The first hand-drawn comic was a total cop-out. Not only is it mostly empty space, but that drawing of George is that same one I used a few comics back. Though, to be fair, it was actually originally drawn to be used in this comic, and I later decided to use it in that comic.
As you can see, aside from that one drawn head, the comic hadn't changed much from its previous sprite form. I'm still using the same font with the same type of text boxes, and even the background is the same. The only difference is that the character is hand-drawn, and not well at that, I might add.
I really wanted the hand-drawn comics to be in color, but without Photoshop to handle the dithering, whenever an image is pasted onto a background, there will be some pixelation around the edge. While this is especially visible when color is added, it's passable when just using grayscale, so that's what I had to do.
Of course, one solution would've been to simply draw everything together, foreground and background in the same drawing, as I'm sure many comic artists without Photoshop already do. Unfortunately, I'm just not skilled enough to do anything like that; I knew if I tried, I would end up forced to draw panel after panel over and over because I'd inevitably screw up one thing and have to start over. (I had a sucky eraser too.) So, instead, I drew each piece separately, then copied and pasted them onto the background. Not only did this allow me to draw less, but I could also reuse images and backgrounds over and over, just like sprites.
Little did I know that this is pretty much actually how most webcomic artists already make their comics, just with Photoshop to help everything look nice.
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