Hello, Mousers!
Friday’s episode of The Life of Nob T. Mouse will feature a different rendering of Nob Mouse for the first time in quite a while. I enjoy mixing up media in order to give a visual representation of different regions, and I also enjoy showing Nob Mouse in different drawing styles (sometimes with an outline, sometimes not. Sometimes spiky-haired, sometimes not, etc.). On Friday, I get to mess with new media again. Why? You’ll have to wait and see.
Swapping different styles means doing things a little differently while I create the comics however. As anyone who listens to The Webcomics Company podcasts will know from episode 6, I usually sketch the comics on paper that has three panel frames already printed on it (this saves me a lot of time and effort getting the sizes and positions of each frame right) then scan the sketch. I ink, colour and letter on computer because it gives me a better, smother feel to the pages.
Because on Friday I am using a lot of crayon colouring, this has necessitated a different approach. For Friday’s episode I’ve inked on paper for the first time since I drew the Nasties! storyline way back in Series One (1999 to be exact). I did this because I needed to ink certain parts of two panels, in order to not cause problems when I coloured them with crayons.
Crayons are not an obvious choice for most people when they sit down to create a web comic but they are remarkably well suited to the medium. They scan well and they are bright. They don’t mix together well but you can’t have everything. For the purpose of this storyline, they are perfect.
I hope you like what I do with them, and why I’ve chosen to do a quick shift in colouring styles. If you don’t like it, that’s okay too. It’s not a permanent shift.
Speaking of liking things, I hope you like that Nob Mouse is going to go daily soon. Well, I say daily. It’s going Monday to Friday. Starting this week, in fact. Consider it a fourteenth birthday present from us to you (and also from us to us, since we love making the comic so much).
