How The Comic is Drawn

The Alphas is drawn by hand using MacroMedia's FreeHand drawing program. (Yes its the same people who gave us ShockWave & Flash files...)

Originally, the comic was drawn by hand on paper and then scanned, as part of a class project with my students (most who are featured in "The Alphas") who created their own comics. Its been over a year since that project has offically died, but not yet forgotten.

To make a Long Story- Short, the resurrection of "The Alphas" came about because of various dares and "Can you do better" comments that were floating around various circles on the internet. So I decided to take on the challenge, and dig up the dead to give it new life. Hence- "The Alphas" was reborn.

I decided to take a twist in the re-creation of the strip, though I have the orginal 25 strips that were drawn by hand, my decision was to redo the drawings in computer graphics. I did this for various reasons, but mainly for the ease and speed my fingers can dance around a Macintosh Keyboard and TrackPad. Hence, I decided that the best program to use was Macromedia's FreeHand because of its ability for fine details and text warping. I would then convert the image to a gif using Adobe PhotoShop.

Lets just say that the best laid pans of Mice and Men are not always up to par.

I have encountered 2 problem with this very simple way of doing things:

1) FreeHand does not lend itself into saving files as PICT/BMP/PNG/JPEG/GIFS or any other web-savvy formats.
It only saves files in its own proprietary format. But it can EXPORT files as an Encapsilated PostScript Definition File.

2) The image loses a lot of its meaning and details when converted to an Encapsilated Post Script.
Things that were not lost, are changed into something else. This I must say is very strange.

As you can see, there is a major difference between the two. But its a nice enough effect for me not to fight the system and try to correct them. Just excuse the dialog when a character mentions a specific color or pattern and the screen shows something different. Its just the way it is in their FreeHand Universe.

(Excuse the jagginess of the images; screen shots are not perfect beings.)

BEFORE: Using Freehand to draw comic




File Converted to Encapsilated PostScript


AFTER: Using PhotoShop to draw comic


Why Freehand?

FreeHand allows objects to be drawn with handles, allowing the manipulation of the object's space. This is great for character articulation, where everyone has a basic body structure which can be moved about in various positions by their joints.

In some cases, handles are added or taken away, depending on the character's posistion. Again this is made easy by Freehand's ability to manipulate the object.
For example:
A character's lower half when it is comprised as a pair of pants, consists of 13 handles which creates a front view of a polymorphic figure that is reconzied as a pair of pants. The handles are at the joint-points: ankles (4 handles- 2 each), knees (4 handles- 2 each), hips/buttock (2 handles), waist (2 handles), and crotch (where the legs join at the center- 1 handle).
As a Female wearing a skirt, the number is added. The pants remains the same or or less, with the colour changed to reflect the female wearing tights. The skirt is then added as a trapezoid-like shape with 6 - 8 handles (excluding pleats and folds the skirt may have). These handles help manipulate the shape of the shirt on the body of the character. If the shirt has pleated-folds or a split seam , a line represeting that fold with 3 - 5 handles are then added.

All this might sound complicated, but its actually quite simple.

Characters are added one by one as objects, articulated and then the next one is added. Speech and text dialogs are then added and finally- speech/thought bubbles and background labels.

When the strip is complete in FreeHand, the strip is then sent through a built-in parser to create a Postscript Encapsulated file. This EPS file is then sent through Photoshop, where the final web-preparations are done to convert the image into a GIF file.