I'm trying to put together a web comic. I don't know if it will be a regular thing, or what, but I have at least a double-handful of strips that I know I want to do. The first one is a photo-based one, a tribute to Irregular Webcomic since it was the strip the finally convinced me that I could probably do something even with my limited drawing skills.
So I've been jotting down ideas, and assembling the things I needed to do the photographs, and taking some test shots...and I finally did all the panels for the first strip tonight. Over and over. God I can be finicky. And it doesn't even look that great. Lighting tiny little toys is a bitch. But I finally got something roughly acceptable...
...and then I hit the Photoshop wall. I don't even have the full-fledged version, but a just the basics one that came with my graphics tablet, and there's an actual learning curve. I can't remember the last time I dealt with a program where getting halfway decent results required learning anything. [Yes, I can, it was emacs, and in the end it wasn't really worth it, 'cause as soon as I started using Eclipse most of the time I started losing my emacs chops.] Programming languages, yes, but programs are something that I mostly muddle through. If it isn't obvious how to do something in most of the programs I use, it's something that I probably don't ever want to do. It's not that Photoshop is that bad, or frustrating, it's just that after fiddling around for an hour or so it's obvious that the even the basic things that I want to do with it are going to take some work to learn how to do, and learning its whole layering paradigm. And I was really hoping that the pictures would be the hardest bit. Nutbunnies.
Posted by joshua at November 29, 2004 11:00 PM