How it all started

Hello everyone and welcome to my webcomic (or is it a “webmanga”?) ‘Pierre the Baking Cat’!

Pierre the Baking Cat, or just “Pierre” for short, is a very special project to me, because it originally started as a script for a children’s book. It was the second book I had ever written, and I was very excited about this new idea for a story I had come up with.

Unfortunately, Sweden is a very difficult country to get published in – especially if you’re a newcomer like me! Anyways, I sent the script to lots of publishers, big and small, and waited… and waited… and waited some more. I don’t know how things are done in other countries, but when you send your script to a publisher in Sweden, you’ll have to expect to wait AT LEAST three months before hearing from them – if they ever reply to you at all, that is (-_- )

Three months passed and after recieving letter after letter of rejection from the publishers, I felt very discouraged and, of course, very disappointed! “Why won’t anybody publish this great story!?”, I thought.

I had no other choice but to let it rest.

Then, one beautiful summer day, I was sitting in my garden and thinking about all of this. “If I can’t get my story published as a book, then what am I going to to with it?”, I thought. That is when I got this other idea. If I can’t get my story about Pierre published as a book, then how about as a comic? Better yet, as a MANGA!?

New ideas started to swarm inside my head, and it didn’t take long before I had my sketchbook and pencil ready and started to think up new characters for the story. And that’s how it all started!

Making the Comic

I’m going to be honest with you. I’ve NEVER made a comic in my whole life (until now), and I couldn’t even imagine how much work that goes into making one! Here below is MY current workflow, just to give you an idea of the process:

1. Plan and draw the panels in Illustrator or Inkscape. Then print the empty panels for stage 2…

2. Draw the “content” inside the panels.

3. Scan it.

4. Ink the artwork with my trusty ‘Wacom Intuos 3′ in my favorite drawing software ‘Easy Paint Tool SAI‘

5. Add speech balloons and other text elements (sound effects etc.) in Illustrator. The font I use for the speech ballons is called “Komika Text” and is totally free! Grab it here from Dafont.com.

6. Send the page to my proofreader friend (you know who you are :D) to proofread.

7. Add screentones in Photoshop (while waiting for my friend to proofread).

8. Proofreader says “OK!”, or “This sounds odd…”. If something needs to be changed, I do it here.

9. Upload the page and write a commentary to it on the “blog” or whatever you want to call it :p

10. Repeat (^ ^ ;)