Thanksgiving Special (Making Of)

  For the past week or so Stefan and I have been considering the idea of writing and illustrating a "Thanksgiving Special" edition for this blog. Earlier this week we had thrown around a few ideas for an original holiday story but didn't finalize anything. However, as we marched on through this week it seemed like time was getting away from us; before we knew it Wednesday had arrived and we still didn't have a finished Thanksgiving story . In fact, all we had was a single piece of paper, upon which were two sketches of "The Thanksgiving Pilgrim" and his team.

  Wednesday morning I came to Stefan and suggested we knuckle down and complete the Thanksgiving edition... by Thanksgiving (the next day). He replied, "Well, if we're gonna do it, we're gonna have to do it today." With that we started off on what turned out to be a quite rewarding task.

PHASE 1: Writing & Illustrations

  We knew that this comic had to be much longer than the regular installments we post. But all we really had to start with conceptually was that it should be like a holiday legend. Sort of a Santa Claus and his Reindeer rather than a pageant-style holiday story. We also came up with the idea of a bat serving as The Pilgrim's guide. So, with those ideas in mind, I started writing the story and drafting the illustrations. Before the clock struck noon, phase one was complete. Then came the hard part...

 

PHASE 2: Digital Remastering

  Stefan and I took turns recreating images on his computer, thinking that our other Adobe enabled machine was already occupied. Upon discovering it wasn't, Stefan conceived the brilliant idea to divide and conquer. So, I went and put one half of the comic through phase two while Stefan finished the other. I'd like to take a moment to clarify that this comic, (Even with it's extensive length) would not normally have taken as long as it did. However, the drawings that we came up with for this strip were in many cases more detailed than usual. Even so, we pushed on.

PHASE 3: Adding Color

  Around 7:00pm we had finally completed phase two. It was now time to colorize. Praise God that this process was nowhere near as time consuming as the former. All the frames were fully colored in what seemed like a blink of an eye.

PHASE 4 & FINAL PHASE: Text Boxes & Layout

  It was now dark out and text boxes still needed to be added, which actually took even longer than the coloring phase. Nevertheless, phase four was over before I knew it and all that was left was compiling the frames into an artboard that would fit the blog. At this point it was nearly 1:00am so I quickly put the comic through a temporary version of the final phase. I went to bed feeling pretty good about making what we believe to be one of our coolest comics yet.

  Thursday morning had arrived. We made some final modifications and before we left for our family thanksgiving celebration, our new Thanksgiving Special was published. It was a bit of a challenge creating and recreating 11 frames in one day. But like I mentioned earlier, it was rewarding to see such a fun idea go from concpet to comic. We hope you enjoy it as much as we have. Happy holidays to all of you!

Thanks for reading!