On Friday, I finally spent a few bucks and upgraded my drawing tablet, an older Wacom Graphire Bluetooth. It worked well for what I needed at the time but now that I’m comicking full-time, something larger and more sophisticated was in order. Enter a large Intuos4 tablet. It’s about double the square footage of my old tablet and offers four times the sensitivity.

I’ve never been comfortable with drawing digitally and now I see why it bothered me. The larger real estate and increased sensitivity gives my hand more room to work, which results in less jerkiness in line quality. I could see myself taking Variables entirely digital in the future, though I love my quill and brush too much to stop inking on paper right now. The upcoming comic strip will be entirely digital so that will be my first foray into eliminating paper altogether on a long-term project. I’m sure I’ll keep talking about the Intuos more as time progresses because I didn’t get a lot of time with it over the weekend. I had half a page to color, which wasn’t nearly enough to really get a feel for how much faster and better the tablet will make my work over the long run.

Here’s page four of Variables! It’s the first of a new scene, introducing Isabel and Candice, two detectives that will play prominent roles in the next 80 or so pages. They’re investigating strange burglaries that are springing up around wealthy neighborhoods of Atlanta as an introduction, you’ll see them interact with a local homeowner for the next few pages. Surprisingly, I’ve had more fun drawing these indoor environments than I did the outdoor areas of the Blake story. It was quite a surprise to me, as indoors have always annoyed me in the past. You never realize just how much crap is in a house until you take a photo of a room and then try to illustrate something similar to make sure the room feels natural and real to the reader. That’s about it for today, see you all on Wednesday for my weekly blog!

Click the page below to jump to the first issue of Variables: 1992.

Page 4

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