Tear-Stained Makeup Page 1

SO! I've been making Tear-Stained Makeup for a bit over two years now. It's a drama! A soap opera! Very different then Carl! I've been having so much fun with the Carl web comic that I've decided to run Tear-Stained up here as well. I figure I'll post around three pages a week until I catch up to myself. Monday! Wednesday! Thursday! I'll be posting little page commentaries to go along with it. I know, I know. Don't look back! But I think I've learned a lot, and hopefully looking back at these pages in some detail might allow me to glean more lessons from my work. This blog appears in both pages so you can always hit the tabs way up top to switch back and forth between pages or click the link that follows:

Page 1:
Oh! Me being clever. Before I started TSM, I decided to only have word balloons, no narration, no thought balloons, no boxes of any kind. Hence the Manhattan Comic Hut. Now you know its Manhattan! OK, not that clever, but effective. I think I broke this rule about 20 pages later. I believe this is also the only computer font used in all of TSM. I originally lettered the first 19 pages with a font, but I hated it. The only thing I hated more was my own lettering. So I compromised. I printed the pages out and hand traced the font, then scanned that in! The result isn't that bad, but WAY too many steps. I'm still battling with lettering. I honestly believe I'm who fonts were invented for. But I love a challenge, and every page of every comic I do I'm hopefully getting better. Also, these are the first time these pages are being seen without the grey tones. I dropped them after issue 3, so I'm removing them from here for a little consistency. Click here to check out the toned version.