Hello all for this week’s RAWRlog.

Two main things to start off with. First I got give a shout out to my buddy Michael Balistreri over at Black Snow Comics. He wrote some really cool stuff about me on the Black Snow Blog, and I really appreciate it. Alex and himself seem to have gone through some stressful times lately regarding publication stuff etc…so I hope they’ll get time to relax and feel better. I was taking a shot at joining them in their bid to publish a relaunched Black Snow graphic novel, but that doesn’t appear to be happening at the moment. So instead, we’ve got some real fun project ideas on the cards, which I hope you will all enjoy! Watch this space. (Literally, because this is where I put site news)

Next, I’ve been thinking about the frequency of the RAWRlog. I’m trying to make this a ‘once-a-week at-least’ affair. The rest of what I do is sort of set to a schedule, in an effort to make certain that I’ve always gotten it done in time. However, the RAWRlog never really had a schedule. This is something I may like to change. And that brings me to the main theme of this week’s RAWRlog.

I would like to talk about; my typical week. (Yea, I know…lame)

It’s kind of a weird thing being a web-artist. In the past, I would think of time-off as simply time-off. I would draw during these times before, but there was never any pressure to use that free time effectively. This is what I had noticed change as soon as I fit into the schedule of publishing Back Office every Monday. And so, just to give you an idea of what it takes, here’s a breakdown of what I do:

Monday

Monday is usually my day for doing the main pencil work for any given Back Office page. I work full time days as an IT professional, Monday to Friday with additional night work when needed. Not counting the usual work involved with cleaning, meals and taking care of a kid, I get one or two hours to work with each night. But it’s enough. Using A3 watercolour paper and HB / B pencils and will draw up the main line work on a Monday night.

Tuesday

This is my typical inking day. Many others like to ink straight away, or use a digital pad to produce their line-work. Personally, I don’t like doing it that way. I prefer to use pencils until I’m happy with the page, and then do the inking on top of that by hand. Before, I would use a quill and a well of India Ink to do this inking, but I felt that this got a little too sloppy sometimes. So I switched to India Ink pens which dry very quickly. I can occasionally get this work done on the Monday too, if there are a lot of silhouettes on the page.

Wednesday / Thursday

I put these 2 days together, since this task can happen on either of them, depending on what is happening that week. I’m in an odd situation, where I am living at the house we’re renovating, but my scanning equipment is at my old place. Long story short, I need to commute to my scanner to get the week’s Back Office in digital form . I use an old Mustek A3 scanner for this. It’s can only handle 600DPI and I also had to improvise a TWAIN driver for it. So it’s due for replacement soon. While I’m there, I also scan up some Bata Neart pages.

Thursday / Friday

Once the page is in digital form, I import into my main comic rendering program. On my Macbook Pro, I run a copy of Manga Studio Debut. Here, I clean up the line work if needed and apply screentones and other effects. I also add the text and speech bubbles. When everything is done, I export the finished JPEG out to GIMP for final cropping and uploading to RAWRtacular.

Saturday / Sunday

Finally, the weekend. Ideally, I should be done with the week’s Back Office by now (it doesn’t always work out that way, depending on what life throws at me). The weekend is reserved for Bata Neart and other projects…or at least it would be normally. The house renovation project can take up a lot of this time, and so Bata Neart doesn’t get as much time here as I would like. This should change over the summer, when we plan to be finished and that is why I have been mentioning the Summer as the launch time for my second (and ironically oldest) webcomic.

And so, there you have it. The RAWRtacular week. I don’t include quality time with my girlfriend, social events, RAWRlog stuff and just plain chill-time in there. But I do run a fairly normal life beyond these pages. I simply like using a lot of that remaining free-time towards the worlds of RAWRtacular comics. Many other web-artists can pull off a Monday – Wednesday – Friday rotation, and I’m really not sure how they do it. I suppose if I focused on one comic and surrendered a lot more of my freetime, I could too. But right now, one comic release a week works best for me.

That’s kind of important. If it didn’t work out, Back Office may start to feel like work, instead of fun I get to share with everyone. If the day ever came that stopped having fun, I would probably stop publishing Back Office. So there you are. That is the typical week of this particular webcomic artist. I hope it was interesting for you and give you an idea of what is involved.

-Rawr