I had a lot of fun drawing the details of the marina, but then found that when I colored everything in that the characters completely disappeared into the complexity. Thank goodness for layers. I use a bunch of layers for each drawing.

First I draw the blank lines for every subject. There is a layer for the content. Then there is a layer just behind that which holds opaque white so that you can’t see through what I just drew (why in a moment), and then the shading is a third layer between those two that use a cool little feature that Manga Studio has called “clip on layer below”. What this does is make it so that only those parts of the layer that are above a filled in part of the layer just below it will be seen. Why does that matter? This allows me to get smooth shading on an object and not worry about coloring over the edges. So three layers for content.

But Tam gets her own layer so that I can make her slightly transparent. She actually gets a set of three layers too. Since we can see the background through Tam, I have to draw the whole background behind her, and I almost always go ahead and draw the full background anyway so that I can arrange things after drawing if I want to, so the background gets its own set of three layers. Then sometimes the background gets split into two sets so that I can put the sky or the water behind everything. There is also the layer that contains the frames, and the layer that has the white page background.  Then we get to text layers. I put them all into a single folder that is above everything else, but there is a separate layer for every piece of text, and another layer for the speech bubbles. Not counting the text I usually have at least 14 layers, often 20 or more.

So the lower layer of the set of three is doing double duty in a pretty slick fashion. It both makes it so that the content layer is opaque, and determines where the shading of the set can be seen. It’s a Manga Studio feature that I feel like I can’t live without now.

And the point of all that is that when I thought that “Hey, that background is too busy, I can’t see the characters!” all I had to do was find the layer that had the background shading and make it invisible with one click. If I hadn’t liked the result I could have immediately brought the shading back, but I did like the result. I found that my line work had already implied enough shading that the grays were not missed, and now I could see the characters.

I do like working digitally.

Yay! The first book is done. By the time this text gets posted it will have been done for a month, but it feels good all the same. Hopefully by the time this is posted I’ll have book two done. I haven’t even started on that yet.  Posting a big buffer is occasionally disorienting. I am not sure I could do it at all without my family to provide me day-to-day feedback. Yay family!

Another real location, the only gas station that most people consider to be in the town of Sausalito. There really isn’t room for another. On the other hand, there are several places where boats can get gas. It probably says something about the town that there are more places where boats can fuel up then cars. Of course the boats usually have to pay an extra dollar or more a gallon, so if your going to sell to a market, sell to the boats and actually make some money.

I’m totally with Kay on the amount of fuel question. Diesel fuel is about 7 pounds a gallon (its slightly lighter than water so the ‘pint a pound’ mantra doesn’t quite apply) and that makes each one of those can about 35 pounds when full. Sure, that’s nothing in the Gym, but carrying it at the end of your arm for a mile and your going to find that your joints aren’t fitting together  right anymore at the end of your walk. I mean he could carry a hundred pounds in each hand for a mile like Tam estimated last comic, but he wouldn’t be doing anything at all the next day, and maybe not the next week.

On the drawing, I initially had a more complete background in the lower panel, but I found that the characters were getting lost, so I just made most of it go away.

Tam would actually deconstruct the magnets. By doing some clever tricks with lasers she can actually vaporize the magnets and distill them into their chemical and atomic components. There are a lot of useful elements and compounds that can be found only in magnets, especially if you are making more carefully manufactured magnets. Of course in a long ocean voyage Kay and Tam would have discussed all of this, but illustrating those discussions would have been beyond boring, so I have them wandering around the streets of Sausalito while having this talk.

My proofreading team (ok, my kids) asked why, if Tam can make water perfectly invisible, does she not look solid? The reason is not because she has to be transparent, but because if she was perfectly realistic to Kay then he might forget that she wasn’t really there. At least if someone catches him talking to her, he can claim “It’s a new Bluetooth set of eyeglasses! Cool isn’t it?”, but if he starts holding doors open for invisible people he would start to stick out. It could even lead to accidents. Better if there is a constant reminder that she isn’t really there.

Here is thumbnail page as a preview.

I have received some questions already about why all the changes. In this first post I will answer some of the why. There are a few parts to that.

Early – Really? I drew this?

SailorsFreedom was initially started as a way for me to practice with a new Wacom tablet I got. The story took hold of me and I ended up putting much more work into it then I ever planned, but I continued to use it as a learning platform. I didn’t worry about continuity or consistency very much and treated every update as a little experiment. In some ways that adds to the experience I think. I can look back and see all the ways that my digital artwork changed, and I suspect some readers really like that aspect of the site. The downside is that as a whole it looked very amateur – because it was. Well, now I think I have figured out how to make a web-comic that looks good, tells a story, and really is the comic I want it to be. So I am making that comic.

Example 2 – getting better.

OK, that explains the format, but what about the content changes? Why did you take down all of my favorite comics?

The original SailorsFreedom was Not Safe For Work. This had a lot of negative consequences for me and the potential for more problems in the future. One, it was tough for me to share and get feedback from friends and family. By definition I couldn’t share it with co-workers. I couldn’t get a second opinion from my kids, and a lot of my friends and family would have no idea what I was doing artistically. Also my wife works for the State Department, and soon we are moving to a country where my old website might have been illegal by the local rules. That was a legal limbo I would just sooner avoid. So I retro-actively made the whole website something I can share with anyone, and I found that I didn’t really miss the comics that are gone. Yes, some of them were pretty good artwork, but none of them were truly critical to the story I really want to tell.

So now it’s SFW and I find myself pretty happy with the change. The old panels will still be available on another part of the site. If they aren’t there right now, I just haven’t gotten around to moving them yet.