Hello everyone. My name is Benj and I’m the creator of the webcomic “I Am Geek”.

Here I’m going to describe in a fair amount of detail exactly what I do to achieve the art style for the comic.

Today we’re going to be looking at a piece I did for the character Jenny Everywhere.
I start with a pretty detailed sketch which fills most of an 8.5 x 11 standard sheet of paper. For the strip I do use a different page for each panel, for whatever reason I seem to get the best results that way. I scan the sketch at as 8-bit Grayscale image with a resolution of 300dpi.
Next I throw the image into Adobe Illustrator. If this were a panel in the strip I would have all the panels defined and would size the image accordingly, but since we’re just doing a sketch I make a document size that best fits the image. In this case that’s 700px X 380px. I place the image on it’s own layer and make it a Template so that I can see it while working in the Outline View Mode. Also, this locks the layer so the sketch can’t be clicked on and moved.
Next I shift the image into Outline View Mode which makes every object appear as an outline no matter what kind of fill or stroke I’ve got on it. I make everything I draw have a fill of black and start drawing out the shapes that are going to make up Ms. Everywhere.
The nice part about working in Illustrator is that nothing is ever locked in stone. I can manipulate any line to fit my needs. The trick to making this step work is understanding that whatever object you’re drawing automatically goes above any objects you’ve previously drawn. So I’ll start with the shape that makes up Jenny’s head and THEN draw in the details. At any time you have to be mindful of what’s on top of what. Otherwise, when you start to color it in it’ll seem as though you’re missing numerous pieces. During this step I’ll also tighten up the image quite a bit, fixing any problems with the sketch. At this point I’m not worrying about shading or major detail, I’m just getting the basics of the sketch traced into vector objects I’ll finish later.
Once I’ve drawn all the basic objects, I return to the normal View of the piece to see what looks like a silhouette of the drawing. Now the reason I did all the objects with a black fill is two fold. 1: I can easily see if I’ve missed some big piece of detail and 2: I all of my shadows that I’ve already drawn are already the color I need them to be in, all I have to do is color everything that ISN’T supposed to be black. Which is what I’ll do next.
So here’s the basic color scheme for the piece. Pretty simple looking, I know. Now I’ll add in a bunch of detail. As with the other drawing, the trick to this is to keep track of what’s in front or behind anything else. The best way that I can describe it is to think of it as a bunch of cut out paper that you have to layer on top of each other to make the it look right.
At this point I’ve done most (if not all) of the shadow detail. I’ve also started to include a teleportation aura which Jenny is opening with her hands. I’ve cropped her body so that we can’t see it on the other side of the teleportation portal. Most of the detail is created in 100% Black objects (the exceptions being the highlight detail on the lens of Jenny’s goggles, which is made of 100% White objects). What I will do now is what I like to call the “Magic” where I’ll lower the transparency of the detail objects. Usually I’ll stick to one of three settings: 25%, 12%, or 6%. For things of a darker tint (i.e. Ian’s dark colored shirt) I may have to use a 50% tint to make it noticeable. For the most part I can stick to the first three settings and achieve what I’m looking for.
Makes a world of difference doesn’t it?
For the basics of the art style I’ll now add the ONE outline around Jenny’s entire body. Now I added a couple more outlines around the scarf to make everything stand out better. I’ll only do stuff like that in special situations where I NEED to have an outline inside the frame of the major outline. And for the most part that’s it. Everything that’s left is to do some effects around the portal and do up a background.

I hope that made sense to everyone. The nice thing about doing this all in Illustrator is I can now scale this to ANY size I want without loosing a lick of detail. As well it’s a much MUCH smaller file size than a comparable Photoshop file and it (to me at least) looks a lot sharper.

I do want to make sure that everyone understands that I am NOT an expert when it comes to this stuff, the above is the result of a LOT of trial and error and years of development. But if you’re willing to put in the time, you’re going to end up with something that looks very unique and is in a format that offers a lot of possible end uses.

Thanks for reading.
-Benj Christensen.