My comic strip for #Iste Daily Leader using @drawcast @PsExpress and Comic Touch #edtech

There was a comic contest for the education technology conference, ISTE12 not too long ago. I unfortunately wasn’t selected for my work to be displayed in their magazine Daily Leader – but now I’d like to show you how I was able to make this digital art.

• I’m not the BEST artist, but I know I could use digital tools for my aid where I was weak. After I had the Far Side-esque concept in my brain, my first step was to find an image of a computer lab to use:

• 2) By using the app: Photoshop Express, I played around with a variety of their filters and special effects so that I could turn a realistic classroom into a cartoon one

• 3) I then began to sketch in gesture lines to get the feeling of where I wanted my subjects to go in order to make an eye grabbing composition. I always try to use the rule of thirds / place the subject slightly off center to be more attractive to the eye

• 4) The next step was to turn the gesture lines into contour sketches, I wanted to have an idea how much the subjects would fill in the space in the cartoon as I needed to make space for the captions later

• 5) I wanted to show the anger/frustration on my face as if I was really in this cartoon. I took this picture on my IPad of myself and then email it to my laptop. I drew from the photo and started to put my features on the cartoon version of myself

• 6) I really got into the Layers function of the Drawcast app where my photograph was the background, my sketch was the midground and I started to add color on the foreground. Unfortunately you are a bit limited with the layer functions as you can’t delete your background, but you can flatten layers or re-arrange them

• 7) I haven’t painted in quite some time, but the color mixing and “blurring” of colors allows you to take Drawcast so that you don’t see every “stroke” from the stylus, but after applying various layers of color, they blend quite nicely with value and shadow through a variety of hues.

• Finally, I used the Comic Touch app, where I could take my finalized drawing but add comic features like speech bubbles, stylized font and captions.  Tell me what ya think and how you use Draw Cast along with tutorials would be great