This post is sort of an addendum to my earlier post. It’s the digital cherry on my analog sundae.
This morning I was playing with a hand-drawn doodle featured in Rumble in the Record Store. I always meant to have a logo on my mutant monster’s tee-shirt, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. I was considering painting it out in a liquid frisket/resisting fluid; work up the drawing and then peel the frisket off leaving a logo sort of like tan lines. Nah! I went back to pixels for this solution.
The drawing was already scanned so I brought it into Affinity Photo and merged it with a logo I cobbled together in Super Vectorizer and Affinity Designer. I placed the logo; rasterized it; liquefied it and played with various layer blending modes. Voila! Now my two-headed nightmare from High School is complete with a tee-shirt graphic!
Ultimately when this story is finished, it will be laid out digitally. There is no way to avoid it in this day and age. Besides, my hand lettering is atrocious, and the word balloons, sound effects and what-have-you will be made on the computer.
Neat technology! That you can merge the two IS the cherry on top!
Back when the production and layout of comics were first being done digitally, some over-eager graphic designer would start placing vector graphics in among the hand-drawn artwork. They would stand out like a sore thumb. The trick is to really blend it with the drawing. There’s a few tricks to make it seem like it’s meant to be there rather than drawing undue attention to a small element.