And So It Begins

Me at work.

Hello! If you're here you're most likely aware that this is a blog by me, Emma T Capps, a 14-year-old author/illustrator/cartoonist, where I'll be writing about my day-to-day art-related battles, accomplishments, projects, and frustrations. Mostly these posts will be focused around the work I do on The Chapel Chronicles, which is my webcomic and related line of greeting cards, magnets, postcards, postage stamps, and more starring my original character, Chapel Smith.

So let's begin with my latest Chapel-related project! Three days ago, on Sunday, I realized it was the last day I could make designs for Chapel charms and have them get printed up by Printsess in time for the comics festival I'll be attending in New York in a month where I'll be selling my Chapel products. Unfortunately, I was super tired from a sleepover the night before and despite my mom's constant prodding, it was one of those days when I worked for about four hours and got maybe two pictures done and ended up punching my computer screen and yelling, "DAMN YOU, MAGNETIC LASSO! I WANT YOU TO GO INSIDE THE LINE! INSIDE!" and my parents decided that for our entire family's mental health and stability I should go have some nice beddie-bye time.

Why must you hurt me in this way, magnetic lasso? 

So after that debacle, Monday morning I got up exceedingly early for a day off from school (9:00 am) and buckled down to work. In order to create nice-looking charms, I figured out I'd have to take my current watercolor images of Chapel and make the lines a lot thicker and cleaner. I wanted to run them through a Live Trace in Adobe Illustrator, which is a filter that basically takes images and vectorizes them. It makes pen lines clean and smooth and dark and gets rid of any lingering paper tone when you run an ink drawing through it, but watercolor paintings generally don't look so great when you Live Trace them, so I decided I'd have to redraw them as pen-and-ink drawings and then color them on the computer.

Anyway, so once I picked which of my greeting cards I wanted to turn into charm designs, I redrew them and scanned them in. We decided to get me my own huge flatbed scanner after one too many frenzied deadline-night trips to FedEx where we were forced to suffer through terribly long lines and curt employees only to discover that we'd been given a scan of a Jesus crossword puzzle. (Not making this up.) 

After scanning in the redrawn images, I ran them through a Live Trace, made the borders thicker, and recolored them all using the computer. It was very painstaking, but worth it.

Phew! After all that on Monday and Sunday, yesterday I finally managed to get back to working on my webcomics. While I'm posting them every Friday, I still have to get them all done by the end of this month to print up a little book in time for the aforementioned comics festival, so I'm working at a grueling schedule of roughly a strip a day. I currently have six done and started work on the seventh after school yesterday. 

Similar to a newspaper comic schedule, the first six of each week schedule will be "weekly" black-and-white strips, and the seventh, a Sunday strip, will be in color. That requires me to tweak my strategy a bit and draw on watercolor paper instead of sketching my panels directly with pen on tracing paper and then editing them on the computer.

Watch out! SPOILER ALERT! Upcoming strip below!

I was hoping to get the strip sketched, inked, and watercolored last night, but once again I overestimated my abilities in terms of balancing art with homework, so I'll have to finish it this evening or tomorrow. 

I'll post again soon - hopefully tomorrow or Friday - to show you the progress of the strip. For now, Spanish homework's a-callin'.