Creating Modern Comics Course

In the comic book industry artists have often been asked to do unreasonable things, the need for constantly being able to produce good quality artwork that serves a very useful function in terms of illustration. And do that all within a monthly deadline is unreasonable in of itself, but then you add in the constantly increasing level of quality that comic books have been undergoing for the last thirty years, or so not only through the means of better quality printing and technology but also because of the fact that the people who are doing the comics are pushing the medium farther and farther every year. It's very very difficult to be competitive in the comic book industry, there's a lot of things that you need to keep on top of and this training is really designed to help with that. This is going to be a very very comprehensive training, it's going to cover every aspect of comic book creation from the beginning of the thumbnail all the way up to the end of the lettering and sending something to print. It really truly will be very very comprehensive. Now penciling and inking and coloring and lettering are all disciplines that could easily fill an eight hour course by themselves, maybe even several eight hour courses by themselves. However, I've been tasked with the challenge of cramming all of that information into eight hours and making it as useful as possible. Because of that I had to cut a couple corners and the first corner that I had to cut was I had to assume that you have already got some sort of training from other VTC courses or from some other type of training, whether it be from school or whatever so that you have some basic functional knowledge of things like the computer, how to run some of the graphics software that are popular in the industry. And if you don't have that information after watching the first couple of videos you'll have a better idea of the types of things that you need to go learn. The other thing that I'm going to have to assume for this training is that you already know how to draw very well. And the reason why I say that is because drawing is something that I could spend many many many courses trying to help, it just, being able to draw the figure well, not even talking about doing things like background design and composition, color theory, there's too many things and there's too many different ways of doing it so I couldn't even begin. One of the things that you can expect from me though is I'm going to try my best to steer clear of issues of style or if it is an issue of style I'll try to make it clear that this is simply my way of doing it and it's not the way of doing it because there is no the way of doing things. We're going to primarily focus on Corel Painter 11 and the main reason why I chose to focus on Corel Painter 11 is because Corel Painter is a natural media emulator. And because of that it's very very adept at mimicking pencils and inks and a lot of the other tools that artists have used traditionally for illustration of comic books for these last hundred plus years that comic books have been in existence. And because of that it's very easy to get a very strong melding between the modern comic book and the classic comic book look in a program like Corel Painter. It's also very cost effective and it's easy to learn. So I highly recommend that you go ahead and check out Corel Painter and of course we'll have lots of opportunities for you to learn more about that. We're also going to be looking very heavily at how 3D can be implemented into our modern comic book workflow. We're not going to really deal with anything that isn't in the computer and we're going to try to do our best to make sure that everything can be done from start to finish within as few programs as possible. What I would say is at the end of this course when you're done watching all of these videos, first of all, the first thing that will probably come into your head is hey I need to watch that again because there was so much good information I'm going to need to get that. But the second thing is you're probably going to realize it's maybe a good thing that the comic book industry is set up the way that it is set up. So that you have pencilers and inkers and colorists and letterists because it's very very difficult to do all of it well. I suppose that's probably one of the main things that you're going to get from this training is this sense of what it takes to do all of these different things well. And when and where you might choose to share some of that burden with your fellow artists and your fellow creators so that you don't overextend yourself and that you can put your focus into the things that you enjoy doing or the things that you feel are important and allowing others to do the things that they're good at. Comic books is a collective medium at heart and I hope that you embrace that. So even though this is designed to help people become a one man band so to speak it is also a way to understand your role within the larger process even better.  

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