People have been into every aspect of the episode – the art, coloring, pacing, dialog, backgrounds – I’ve gotten great feedback on every side of the episode.

Below is a collection of ‘pages’ from Petra’s Call.

On the left are images from Episode 9, on the right are three of my favorite images from the earlier episodes. Even with a quick glance anyone can see there’s a big difference in the style, consistency, composition and overall feel of the pages.

Taking my time - and the work gets better.

While my process is always changing and I’m always trying new things, the biggest contributor to the improvements in Episode 9 is that I made one simple and major change:

I took my time.

Up until Episode 9, I had been working with tight schedules and was always pushing myself for the deadline.

“I have to get all of the pages inked in the next 2 hours – and then it’s done.”
“I have 2 mornings to get the whole issue penciled, if it isn’t done in time, it doesn’t matter, I’m going to inks.”

I needed to take more time and give myself more perspective on the work. This let me do a few key things that weren’t part of my process before.

A) Editorial feedback from my wife. I gave my wife 5 drafts through script to final art. She gave me a lot of dialog and pacing feedback that made a big difference.

B) Redrawing and redrawing some more. From thumbs to final inks, I spent a lot more time sweating the details. It took a lot longer, but it was worth it.

C) Taking a breather. Stepping away from the work to work on something else and coming back with fresh eyes. A big step here was doing the old ‘horizontal flip’ trick, where you flip the art 180 degrees horizontally, which exposes mistakes you wouldn’t have caught otherwise.

D) Putting in the extra time. Making a fully colored comic, plus setting up the site, Flash browser and everything else (you know – day job making video games, wife and kid, etc) takes a lot of time. I had set aside two hours every morning to work on Petra’s Call – and that was it. Now I am spending more evenings and weekends working on the comic as well.

All of these have helped me ‘Level up’ with my work on Petra’s Call and I am at a point where I’m a lot happier with the work I’m producing.

Now – back to the drawing.

A BIG part of my processes for Petra’s Call is speed. Every step needs to be fast. I have about 14 hours a week to write, draw, color and “Flash-up” each episode, which is roughly equal to 2-3 comic pages.

This is the process for doing the mountains, but the same principals apply for the trees, mid-ground and foreground and can also be applied to interiors.

Step 1 – The Mountain Shape.
- Start with a blank image
- Select the whole image (Command/Ctrl – A)
- Fill it with the color of the sky using the Bucket Tool (G) – Name this layer ‘Sky’
- Create a New Layer – label it ‘Mountains’
- Select the lasso tool (L) and with the whole image still selected, cut out the shapes of the mountain. This will be one line going across your whole image.
If you are unfamiliar with the shapes of mountains, look at reference and have it open when you are cutting. Mountains are not all the same, so some reference will help your mountains keep consistent. (the mountains in Petra’s Call are based on the Rocky Mountains)
- Once you have the shape of the mountain selected, fill it with the Bucket Tool (G).
Note: it’s important to have anti-aliasing off with this process to allow for clean selections and editing later on.
For a background color, I will take a color from my palette (I use my own preset palettes) and reduce the saturation and increase the lightness. (Color adjustment set to HSB Sliders)
As objects go into the distance, they loose saturation and contrast – even with a basic image like this, desaturating the color for things in the distance helps push them back in the image.

Now you have your basic shape of the mountain.

Mountain Flats

In this particular instance, I wanted the reader to feel surrounded and trapped by the mountains, so I didn’t put them on the horizon, I cupped them across the top of the frame to show that the Oleksyn Valley is surrounded by mountains.

Step 2 – Shadows
- Select the Mountains using the Magic Wand (W).
- With the Mountains selected, you want to cut away EVERY place that is going to have contact with the Sun. This can mess with your mind a bit, but the idea is that you aren’t adding shadows, you are taking away the areas that DON’T have shadows.
The benefit of cutting away is that you don’t have to worry about shadows that are on the edge of the mountain, which saves the time of meticulously lassoing something, or struggling with the magnetic lasso.
- Note: You can hold down the Option Key to continually subtract from the selection.
- Ultimately, you will have a bunch of areas selected.

Shadows Selected

- Create and select a new layer – label it ‘Shadows’
- Select a dark color – generally you shadows to be contrasting the primary light source in your piece. In this case, a very bright mid-day yellow is contrasted by a dark purple. I already have a dark purple my pallet, so I use that.
- Select the Paint Bucket (G) and set the Opacity to 15-20% – personal preference.
- Hit ‘H’ to hide the selection
- Click with the Paint Bucket – this will drop the shadows onto that layer.
- At this point you might want to undo the Paint Bucket to go back and make some adjustments to your selection. Do the shadows look wonky? Are they balanced?
- Once you are confident in the shapes of the shadows you can click to your hearts content to find the right darkness of the shadows.

Mountain with Shadows

Step 3 – Trees on the mountainside

The shadows seemed a little lonely on the mountain, so I decided to add some trees.

- Select the lasso tool yet again (L)
- Select areas where you want trees, holding down shift to keep adding to the selection.
- Create a new layer – Call it ‘Trees on the Mountain’
- Select a color – I grabbed a green I was planning on using for trees and desaturated and lightened it.
- Use the Paint Bucket (G) at 20% and click to add the trees. You’ll probably have to click a few times, but you don’t want them to be opaque. By keeping them transclucent, you help reduce contrast, which, in-turn helps push the objects into the distance in the image.

At this point, you can repeat the same process for each major layer of depth in the image, increasing saturation and contrast as you get to the front of the image.

Final Background

It took me a bit of trial and error to feel comfortable with this process, but right now, a background like this can be done in a little over an hour.

A big thing I want to do (and am struggling with) with Petra’s Call is to build each episode to stand alone.

The ultimate goal is that each episode will present a piece of the overall story that can stand on it’s own. If somebody has never read Petra’s Call before, they should be able to drop into any episode and be able to figure out what’s going on – and ideally, want to read more (you know – if dinosaurs and robots are their kind of thing).

This is the goal – and it’s a hard nut to crack. Take traditional comics – 22 pages long, about 6 panels/page – that’s an average of 132 panels in one issue of a comic. 132 panels to tell your story.

Petra’s Call has about 12 panels per episode, sometimes more, sometimes less, but 12 is:
a) An amount of work I can finish in one week.
b) Enough space to build a complete scene.
c) Not even close to 132 panels traditionally used to tell a comic story.

For me to figure out how to get these episodes to stand-alone – I had to look at the episode gap – the events that happen between each episode. In the first 5 episodes – Petra’s Call is very ‘moment-to-moment’. You are with Petra and Kodiak every step of the way. When you finish an episode, the next episode picks up right where we left off.

This changes with Episode 6.

There is a big gap between Petra having the Calling on the back of the T-Rex and Kodiak holding Petra on the river bank. What happened to the T-Rex? Why is Petra lying on the ground?

These are things that don’t directly impact the story – and as such, they don’t need to be shown. I can put them in the Episode Gap – the space where I let the readers fill in the spaces (for the record, I know what happened, but I’ll let you use your imagination).

Finding and deciding what goes into the episode gap is something that I’ve struggled with since I started working on Petra’s Call. It’s hard to find reference for dealing with episode gaps in short form. There have been a variety of different comic stories told in shorter formats, but they are hard to find. I figured I would wing it and find the sweet sport for how to build a scene out of 12 panels.

Then, almost as if DC comics was reading my notes on episodes, they release Wednesday Comics.

For those who don’t know, Wednesday Comics is a new project from DC comics which collect 12 one-page comics in a newspaper format. Each of the stories features a top notch creative team and in most cases, each one-page story can stand on its own.

For a guy struggling with the episode gap, this was like a gift from the gods. I could see how legendary creators put together a stand-alone story in 6-15 panels, making Wednesday comics the closest thing to what I want to accomplish with Petra’s Call (the sole exception being Ben Caldwell’s Wonder Woman comic in Wednesday comics comics in at 30+ panels).

Going through Wednesday Comics, especially the ‘man’ comics (Batman, Superman, Hawkman, Kamandi) has really helped me decide what I put on the page and what I leave to the reader’s imagination. Which in turn has helped me understand how I can reach the ultimate goal of each episode being able to stand on its own.

When I first started working on Petra’s Call, I fell into a trap that a lot of creators fall into – I kept rewriting and redrawing Episode 1.

I would finish it, throw everything out and do it again because I had spotted a tiny flaw that apparently required a complete re-write. After spending two months working on Petra’s Call, I had 5 versions of Episode 1 at different levels of completion, but I hadn’t even thought about starting Episode 2. And for a comic that was supposed to put out one episode a week, that was a problem.

My art, writing, Flash Skillz and understanding of the medium were always improving, so I always knew I could do better, so I kept going back and starting from scratch – because I knew I could do better. My wheels were spinning – I was doing a ton of work – on one episode.

I had to start moving forward.

I came up with a plan: I would complete 8 episodes, and then, with these episodes done, I would go back and redo the first 4 episodes and then move onto Episode 9. (the initial plan was 6 episodes complete and redo first 2, but pacing, staging and story demands broke up the first two bigger episodes into more episodes.)

Another part of the plan was to do each episode in a completely different style until I found something I was comfortable with.

Before Petra’s Call, I had barely used Photoshop at all. I had never digitally painted, colored and even sketched in Photoshop before. I knew I would learn a lot by doing the first round of episodes and playing around in each one.

Episode 5 was an experiment in a combination of a loose painted/sketched style with some cleaner animated style panels. In some places it really works and in others, it’s really weird. When it came time to decide whether I was going to redo the episode, I decided to leave it as-is and push forward.

It’s a fun experiment and I hope you enjoy it.

I’ve got a pretty solid routine and a great set-up at home. I sit down every morning at 5AM (yes, you heard correctly) in front of my Cintiq and I work for 2 hours and then pick up additional work sometimes in the evenings.  With the Cintiq I get to draw right on the screen – it’s great, I love it to bits.

But when I hit the road, I have to leave the Cintiq at home and swap out to a Wacom Intuos.  The tablets are about the same size as my 15″ Macbook Pro, so it all packs up quite nicely.   Working with the Intuos on the road was proving to be a bit slower than my Cintiq, which was frustrating.

I eventually figured out that it wasn’t the tablet that was slowing me down but it was the hot keys, always reaching up to my laptop keyboard took me out of the zone. Now my tiny little bluetooth Apple keyboard hits the road with me. It might seem like overkill, but Photoshop hotkeys are my best friend.

The other key to hitting the road with a webcomic is actually accessing the web. Hotels love to charge you $15/day for Internet access from your room, which, honestly, is quite insane, but thanks to iPhone 3.0, that won’t be a problem anymore (at least not when I’m in Canada).

I have recently set up tethering on my iPhone and I couldn’t be happier. After 20 seconds of set-up, I’ve got my laptop online through my iPhone’s connection and I’m ready to upload episodes, hit the forums or do anything else online that I can’t do on the iPhone itself – such as look at Flash sites (Quick aside: Seriously Apple – my 4 year old N73 can run Flash – you and Adobe need to get it together and get Flash on the iPhone)

All I need to take my art studio on the road is a little shoulder bag, 1 tiny laptop, 1 tiny tablet, 1 tiny keyboard, an iPhone and two battery chargers and I’m set.

In art school, you do a lot of figure drawing. A LOT of figure drawing. You start to figure out the human body, how feet work, how legs bend, the rough shape of a head. You figure it out because you do it all the time.

15 years after finishing art school, and not drawing a heck of a lot during those 15 years, I was rusty, but the days upon days of figure drawing are still in my system.

The thing we didn’t do a lot of in art school was dinosaur drawing. There was a dino-skeleton in the Biology building and one day we all went to the atrium to draw from reference. All of the nerds immediately sized up the big old skeleton. After 5 minutes of drawing dino bones, most people gave up and moved onto drawing a plant or turtle… I pushed through and tried to draw the damned thing, ribs and teeth and all.

The drawing was horrible.

After my miserable failure, I returned to the Biology building a few times to draw from that monster, but it always sucked.

At the time I was drawing every day – and mostly people. I would draw people waiting for the bus, on the bus, in class, in the lounge, in restaurants, everywhere. I was pretty happy drawing people.

Then the t-rex stepped in. And damn it all, I never could get that skeleton to look remotely good.

Now, for better or worse, I’m climbing back on that horse.

There are going to be a lot of dinosaurs in Petra’s Call. One is even going to be an important character. It’s not going to be easy, and at times, it won’t be pretty, but I’m taking this one on.

Chasing down your demons, even from 15 years ago, is hard, but what really scares me is when I have to draw robots, and then have the robot fight dinosaurs… While it’ll be super awesome and fun when it’s done, sitting down to actually draw it scares the crap out of me.