Available FAQs
This FAQ gives advice on how to set up your system to enjoy Lucy Lastique and online art in general, and discusses
Jaxtraw's work method and techniques.
The Main FAQ gives general advice and assistance regarding the website, Jaxtraw Studios, billing and subscription enquiries, and copyright issues.
The BASIC COLOURING TUTORIAL is a tutorial on basic digital colouring technique, which may be of interest to artists wishing to learn more.
Tips On Reading For Maximum Enjoyment
What is the best way to read Lucy's adventures?
How should I set up my display?
What about monitor gamma?
About Jaxtraw's Work Method
What hardware and software do you use?
Do you do any of this stuff using real world media?
What about the lettering? What fonts do you use?
Do you write a script, then work to that when producing the art?
How do you approach page layout?
I have a question not covered by this FAQ.
What is the best way to read Lucy's adventures?
For casual reading, reading the strip direct on the website is fine, but if you're going to read long sections of the thing, I'd recommend an offline reader such as Irfanview, which is free. This is a Windows program, if anyone out there has a suggestion fo Mac or Linux equivalents, I'd be thrilled to add them to this FAQ. Put all of Lucy's adventures in the same folder (where you'll find they'll magically arrange themselves in alphabetical order), and set your monitor's resolution to 800X600 True Color (24 bit or 32 bit). Open the first page you're going to read in Irfanview, and then hit Enter, which will display the pages full screen. Now you can read back and forth through the strip using the Page Up and Page Down keys, which is far more enjoyable than all that clicking on the website- especially if you normally use an 800X600 resolution in which case you have to do a lot of scrolling as well! You can download the strip as ZIP files from the downloads area, in big easy chunks :)
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How should I set up my display?
As explained above, for offline reading I recommend a monitor resolution of 800X600 True Colour. As a general rule for setting up a CRT monitor, you should adjust it until the black areas are as black as possible while the white areas give a clear strong white; normally this means setting the Contrast to maximum and then adjusting the brightness to suit.
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What about monitor gamma?
Graphics professionals and others with a knowledge of computer graphics will know that the term "Gamma" describes how the monitor responds to the level of its input signal. In a simple world, a doubling of signal strength (voltage on the cable) would cause a doubling of brightness, so for instance a 50% gray would be half as bright as 100% white. The world isn't that simple though, and in fact 50% voltage in general produces much less output. This difference between the ideal Linear relationship and the real Non Linear relationship is called Gamma. A linear monitor would have a gamma of 1.0 (input=output). Macs have a set gamma of about 1.8. Windows machines are all over the place.
My monitor is set to a gamma of 2.2, which is an approximante ballpark for somewhere in the middle of the gammas of most Windows machines, which are generally uncalibrated but tend to be around this figure, so if you want to see Lucy's adventures as closely to how I see them as possible, your monitor should be around this figure too. If you're a Windows user and would like to set up your monitor's Gamma, which is advisable regardless of whether you read Lucy or not, I'd recommend This Page which not only explains the whole thing better than I've just done, but also offers just about the best calbration-by-eye tools I've found anywhere.
As a final point, I've found occasional websites recommending a Gamma setting of 1.0. This is completely and utterly wrong, and if you try it you'll go blind. It makes everything unbearably bright, and, worse, just means your display looks like nobody else's, which isn't exactly what we're trying for here.
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What hardware and software do you use?
Lucy Lastique and all and any other strips and cartoons I create are produced from start to finish on my PC. It's a 1.8GHz Athlon, Matrox 550 Graphics (not much use for 3D but a fabulous 2D display with good colour rendering), 1GB RAM. The monitor is a CTX PR960F which has a 19" tube and which I run at the silly resolution of 1792X1344 which is frankly too small for most tasks but great for art. Disks run as RAID 1, which means each disk is actually a pair of disks that back each other up so that the loss of one disk doesn't result in the loss of the data. For input I use an aging Wacom ArtPad II A4. The whole lot sits on a huge desk I built myself in a rare burst of DIY enthusiasm.
I do the "pencilling" in Micrografx Picture Publisher 8.0, which is a now defunct program from a practically defunct company (they were consumed by Corel). It was the first decent digital art program I ever got my hands on, I'm used to it, and for drawing I still prefer it to anything else I've tried. I used to do the colouring in that software too, but with episode 20 of Lucy I made the long overdue switch to Adobe Photoshop which remains simply the best for digital colouring. I use version 5.5. I've tried version 7.0, but can't get on with the fangled new media brushes, which I probably wouldn't use anyway. For lettering, panel borders etc, I use the simply marvellous Xara X, a program which deserves more recognition than it gets. Not only is it very powerful and incredibly fast, it also has the most intuitive, hands-on interface of any vector graphics program I've ever seen, and is a joy to use. I heartily recommend it, and if you want to find out more here's The Xara Website.
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Do you do any of this stuff using real media?
No, and frankly I can't see the point of doing so if it's all got to end up on a screen anyway. It amazes me how many of the people drawing digital toons still believe that the best method is to start with a drawing on paper, then go through the pointless fanglement of scanning it, adjusting the scan, and all that malarkey. Many people seem to find the idea of drawing on a graphics tablet odd because of the dissociation betwen hand and eye (the "pencil" is in one place, the marks it makes in another) but if you're going to do digital colouring, you've got to get used to that anyway... and nobody complains about the bizarre practice of moving a little plastic blob around the desk to point a digital "pointer" that isn't even moving at the same speed :) Anyhoo... when I first got a Wacom I too assumed it would allow me to digitally colour pencil drawings- then when I started using it I naturally gravitated to drawing full time on the PC. It's a more seamless process. Also, there's an infinite supply of digital paper on which you can erase forever without wearing a hole in it, you can draw construction lines that can be removed completely without a mark and, with a comic strip, if you realise panel 4 is dire and needs to be redrawn you don't have to go off and draw another one on paper (right size remember), scan it in, cut and paste and all that.
As a further encouragement to more artists to "make the switch", I'll just mention that people sometimes ask me how long it took to "learn how to draw with a graphics tablet" as if it's some arduous spiritual quest for only the strong of heart. Well, if memory serves it took me about as long as it took me to "learn how to point and click with a mouse". Learning to draw well with a graphics tablet is a different thing, but that's because learning to draw well at all is an arduous spiritual quest, and I'll let you guys know the instant I find myself standing in the temple at the quest's end :)
Just quickly I'll add a couple more points; there is no way on the green earth that anyone can draw with a mouse, it's as impossible as trying to paint with a cement block. And colouring with a mouse is nearly as impossible (you can get some simple shading and effects perhaps but nothing more). If you're interested in computerised graphic art GET A GRAPHICS TABLET.
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What about the lettering? What fonts do you use?
This is going to sound a bit crap, but the main font I use is the Microsoft Comic Sans font that comes with Windows. I started using it waaaaay back when I took my first tentative digital comic steps, and it's kind of stuck. Yes, I'm well aware that this font is loathed by many, and as a feeble defence against the howls of derision I'd just like to add that I don't quite use it in its "raw" state. The kerning on some characters, especially the period and exclamation mark are dire and I have to adjust them every time they're used.
Other fonts I use: Todger's te'ep bubble font is called Pink LET, and Alienne and various other te'eps use that too. It used to be something else, but unfortunately I lost that after an HD crash, and had no idea where I originally got it. In fact I don't know where I got most of the fonts I use, they got installed free with some graphics app or other. One source for good comics fonts which I do use occasionally is Blambot. I should use these fonts more, but for some reason I don't. The main ones of theirs I use are Umberto and Twelve Ton Goldfish, which find their way into a lot of Lucy's sound effects and suchlike. For insane, angry yelling type moments (such as Arius's telepathic yelling in episode 26) I use a font called Smudger LET. The Lucy Lastique logo/banner font is called Chimes.
Most of the time I have to make some adjustments to the fonts, which is why a good vector app with good text handling like Xara X is so important. If you can't adjust the leading, tracking and kerning of text then as far as comic lettering goes you're on the highway to nowhere, and if you're planning some comic lettering and don't know what leading, tracking and kerning are, then ditto. As time has gone by, I've noticed more and more that there is a heck of a lot of truly awful lettering going on in webcomics, and I suspect that is because many people simply don't pay any attention to it. Lettering is very important in comics; if it's crap it ruins things and makes the whole effort look terribly unprofessional. It is, after all, the way the characters communicate, and has to convey the expression of what they're saying as well as just the content, since unlike in a novel where the writer can explain all that, all us comics people have is a bubble and the raw language. Just because you're lettering digitally, and the fonts are all set up beforehand, that doesn't mean that they will look right in a speech bubble; for instance I invariably have to reduce the line spacings from their default truetype values.
In fact, this has been niggling at me so much of late that I'm planning to create a lettering tutorial. If there's one on this website, it means I did get around to that. If there isn't, it means I haven't got around to it yet :)
Whatever, if you're producing any kind of webcomic/strip, may I urge you to take another look at lettering? Believe me, it'll be worth it.
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Do you write a script, then work to that when producing the art?
No. I start a story or episode with a fairly loosely defined plot in mind, and work to that; how loosely defined it is varies from month to month and indeed from day to day. I find that I have my best ideas when I'm working, just letting things flow, rather than sitting down with a notepad and pencil trying very hard to think something up. I'm quite prepared to radically change or even discard plot ideas if I think up something better later on, and this happens quite frequently. Sometimes, for instnace, a bit-part character, once on the page, seems to demand greater attention and a greater role in a story, or a small incident I think up starts a whole sub-plot. For me this is part of the fun of creation, and keeps things fresh. I'd find it very dull working to a rigid script; it would feel almost like I'd be subsumed as my own contract illustrator :) It's also a simple fact that some things that seem like great ideas at the plotting stage either don't work well on the page or work out as planned, and I like having the flexibility to just alter things as I see fit.
An additional point here; it's very easy indeed to get carried away with ideas before one starts work; I refer to it myself as "kitchen sink plotting" because you find you've started a story planning to put everything in there but the kitchen sink, as the saying goes. To begin work with a long, complex story ahead can be intimidating and discouraging. Comic art is slow to produce (especially detailed, airbrushed comic art) and if one has just spent 3 days completing page 1 of a planned 500 page epic it's very easy to become discouraged as one contemplates the sheer cliffs of the mountain one has chosen to scale, and give up. Ideas are easy to have, realising them is arduous work and choosing which need editing out for reasons of pacing or quality or space is difficult indeed. In my time on the web I've seen a lot of comic strips begun, but far fewer of them actually completed. People start with a wave of enthusiasm, a rush of blood to the head, and a plot that's too long and complex, then a week or few later give up because they've been too grandiose in their plans. If you're reading this with the idea of creating your own (web)comic, I would strongly encourage you to think simple.
Having said all that, the individual Lucy stories fit into a larger, developing plot framework which has years of potential within it, and many concepts mapped out very far ahead. How and when and where I choose to develop and reveal those concepts, though, is and always will be in a state of flux, and that framework itself evolves as I, like the readers, learn more about Lucy's universe.
So far as dialogue and the actual wording of the script goes, these aren't fixed until I come to the lettering and finishing stage, which I always do when all the artwork is finished. I make notes throughout the month as I'm working of dialogue and script fragments, just as aides memoire, but these are only fixed when they make it into a speech balloon :) I've come to learn that comic scripting is more difficult than one might think. There's not much space for long speeches in a comic panel, especially one at web resolution! I often have to be quite harsh editing down the Shakespearian speeches that inhabit my imagination to make them fit; plus, in a comics format, sometimes "My word, the Arcturian snafflebeast has suddenly attacked me without provocation" doesn't work half so well as an exclamatory "Eep!" :)
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How do you approach page layout?
There are differing opinions within comic illustration regarding this, but for me I like to think of the page as a unit which should be considered as a whole, as well as as a series of individual panels. I guess I'm quite conservative in that, depsite working for a web audience, I still think in terms of pages. Some, notably the brilliant Scott Mcloud disparage this as fuddy-duddyism and advocate using the web to break out of the familiar page rectangle with kerrrrrrrrazy alternate panel layouts, based on HTML. While I'm intrigued by such ideas, I'm not as yet convinced that they offer a better reading experience; especially as western humans such as myself are used to the concept (from the written word) that the sequence of reading should run left-to-right, down, left-to-right, down and so on. So as of now, I'm sticking with old-fashioned comic pages layouts.
The page as a unit has a number of things going for it, most notably as an aid to pacing the storyline. For instance, it seems very natural to put a shock or surprise at the start of a page, so that the reader isn't "spoiled" by accidentally glancing ahead while reading the build-up to it. Punch lines of the spoken kind for good reasons traditionally go in a page's last panel. Cuts between scenes and/or locations work differently depending on whether they are in the middle of a page or between pages. And so on.
As far as the shape of the page goes, that is currently dictated by the standard computer monitor shape; a 4:3 width/height ratio. It's not the ideal shape for a comics page and tends to limit the variety of panel shapes within the page I can use, but there's not really much I can do about that unless we all switch to widescreen monitors! I think if people are going to read comics on the net/web, the very least the humble creator of said comics can do is to make that reading experience as pleasant as possible by reducing the need for scrolling. I don't like scrolling any more than I have to, and I don't think anyone else does either. With Lucy's 4:3 adventures in a good image viewer, as recommended above, the reader can sit back and enjoy the story, just hitting a key to move to the next part, rather than having to hunch over a mouse cursing at its sticky ball. I have considered the occasional panoramically wide page as an occasional dramatic effect (in fact I've considered that for the episode I'm working on now, Lucy 27) but for now I'm holding it in abeyance for the reason just stated.
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I have a question not covered by this FAQ.
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