Gibson Girl Pages update pg2-6 +Art talk about printers ^^;

Happy Tuesday everyone!

This update might not really seem like a big deal but I wanted to report some progress on pages even if it's mostly just cleaning up old pages. I've been sticking to my daily comic work habit on these so far this month and while cleaning up and adjusting old pages isn't super interesting, it is a part of the process to get this thing ready for print.

Boring art/tech talk:
I started laying out the text for this comic in Photoshpo and it's a HUGE pain and super slow. Since I've started using InDesign to format the books for printing I'm thinking I may try to do the text and speech bubbles in ID as well. In the future I'd like to try doing comics in CSP because I know it has nice tools for speech bubbles, but since I'm doing this comic with a weird font I only have access to through Photoshop, my hands are kinda tied.

My old inkjet printer had the capability of duplex (double-sided) printing, but wouldn't print imposed pages (two page spreads correctly formatted for their page order in a printed book) so I developed a photoshop  template to help me make imposed pages that I could then combine into a PDF to print form. It was tedious but it worked. 

If any of you are interested in the process of printing booklets at home let me know and I can share some of those files/tools.

I've been learning a lot about printing and the technical aspects of it in order to make the process of making printed books easier and faster and I'm so excited to get all of my old stuff updated and ready to print at the larger size.

Even in college, I've always had a printer, just so I could see my digital work in physical form. I can't quite explain it but it always means something different to be able to hold it in my hands, rather than see it on a backlit screen. I've taken to printing out my books even just as rough page layouts, just to see what they might feel like to flip through rather than scroll through.

I know I might be optimizing for an experience that few people ever get, but I figure if it works in print it will work on a screen too. Sometimes when I am adding pages I worry that I'll upset some nice page turns/reveals that are in the book form, but since I don't do two page spreads typically, it's usually not an issue.

I do appreciate having the limitations of inkjet for as long as I did though. It helped me slowly learn a process rather than trying to learn everything all at once, which I'm learning is  just the way I work best. I feel easily overwhelmed when I don't understand a process from start to finish and it slows me down a lot. This is one piece of equipment I love, even though it's ungainly and heavy, it made it possible for me to make comics at home-- a big heavy paper guillotine. I need to have the blade sharpened before I do the next print run of physical comics just so the pages ends are all nice and crisp.

Even my stickers have been born out of limitation. I bought full sticker sheets to print on and asked myself what kinda sticker would be good as a simple square and arrived at stamps. I knew I couldn't cut anything more complicated than that without it taking a TON of time for what's otherwise just a freebie.

Thanks for reading my ramblings, hope you have a great! 

♥Wint