Operation Elusive Concept first saw the light of day in 2004, and you can blame my "better half" Brian and Fort Eustis's newspaper, The Wheel, for its beginnings.

From 2003 until 2004, we were stationed in southern Virginia at Fort Eustis, the home of the Transportation Corps, as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. While there, we kept up with things in the local base newspaper, which was published each Thursday. On one Thursday, Brian casually said, after having read the comics page in the paper, "You should draw a comic - you could do so much better than the ones that are in here now."

I decided to give it a try - especially since I had been drawing little comics about Fort Eustis already, and each section in the MOC (that is, Mobilization Operations Center) was sporting a little funny logo I'd come up with, not to mention a rather large mural in the MOC's conference room I'd painted overnight while on CQ.

Even though I have some talent for drawing and a lot of ideas, I'd never attempted to draw a weekly comic strip before, nor did I know how to actually get the paper to run the strip. I decided to email the editors and ask for more information before getting to work. They told me they needed at least eight strips in order to add the comic to their paper, but didn't give me any other guidance.

Needless to say, those first eight strips were the completely wrong format after I got done drawing them. I quickly learned that they wanted them in full color rather than black and white, which was a problem in itself because I'd never even tried coloring my artwork on the computer before. And they needed to be a certain format - 9 x 4.

But it was coming up with a good title for my comic strip that gave me the hardest time. I'd originally wanted to call the strip "An Army of One" because I was planning on following the perspective of one soldier throughout the comic, but the paper was already running a strip called "Army of Me", so I had to scrap that idea. In retrospect that was a good thing because I can draw as many different soldiers as I want and don't have to stick with a regular cast of characters.

Brian unwittingly came up with a title for my comic strip as well - he was looking through AR 670-1 in search of some measurements, and came across a listing of operations for which the participating units had been authorized combat patches. "Operation Elusive Concept" was one of those, and when I heard that name I thought it's just too funny not to use. Whoever titled the original operation, you're to blame for the name of this strip, too!

Every comic starts out with a simple idea and sometimes these come to me when I'm in the strangest places: in the shower, while reading a book, watching television, or laying in bed trying to fall asleep. I then take the idea and write it down in a sentence or less (just enough to remember the idea) on a piece of notepaper I keep in the back of my drawing pad.

When I sit down to draw new strips, I go over my notes and pick a strip that I can envision right away. Before I ever put anything on paper, I get a mental picture of how I want each panel to look. For the actual drawing I use smooth Bristol paper which is almost like card stock so it doesn't wrinkle when I erase the pencil lines after inking, and because it has a completely smooth surface, the ink doesn't bleed or smear. Another reason I use Bristol paper is that it comes in 9 x 12 pads, which allows me to draw three comics on each page - it's a good thing, because the paper isn't cheap.

I use a mechanical pencil with 2 HB leads for the initial drawings, and sometimes it takes me several tries and corrections until I get the picture to look the way I want it to. After drawing I "ink" the images using Staedtler Mars Professional brand drafting pens, which are really great to work with because they are waterproof, fade-proof and dry quickly. They also have replaceable ink cores so that I only have to buy replacements rather than new pen sets each time they're empty.

This is the initial inking. I usually use a .35 size tip for this.

After I've inked the complete comic strip using the fine-tip pen, I use a pen with a much larger tip to draw the fat outlines that help my characters stand out more from their backgrounds.

Everything after this point is done on my computer. First, I scan the images and then take them into Photoshop where they are colored and the text and borders are added. I scan them into Brian's desktop computer or my laptop, depending on what I feel like. The scanner is pretty easy to move around...

This is what the scanning process looks like. All of the strips have to be scanned sideways because the paper is larger than the letter-sized surface of the scanner. When I'm done scanning, I save the images to a flash drive and then head over to my laptop where I do the rest of the work.

That's my work surface showing my old laptop (I have since replaced it with a newer HP laptop), my Wacom tablet, which I use for most of the coloring process, and my rather cluttered desk. Never mind the mess ... and ignore the 1SGT voodoo-doll hanging above it. Actually, much of the time I take my laptop into the living room and work on the couch.

I first open the new comic strips in ACDSee where I rotate them, adjust the contrast, and resize them all to 1000 pixels wide, which is the full-view size for the strips on the website. Then I save them under a somewhat descriptive name in my projects folder and open Photoshop. At the time I originally wrote this "how to", I still used Photoshop 6. I now use Photoshop 7 for all my digital work and editing.

A new strip in ACDSee where I rotate and adjust the image.

I use Photoshop 6 for all the coloring and backgrounds. I start out by creating a new layer called "color", which is placed below the original line art which I usually rename "top" since it is the top layer. I set the layer properties for the top layer to "multiply", which makes the lines darker and crisp looking once I apply the color behind them.

I've made a lot of patterns that I've saved as presets in Photoshop, which allows me to fill in camouflage fabrics and equipment quickly and easily - a definite bonus since each comic takes me several hours - and I generally use edited photos for the backgrounds to make them more interesting and detailed. I don't like comics where it's just a bunch of talking heads, and I think that the photo backgrounds make my comic quite unique.

Once I have finished the coloring and added panel borders, it's almost a complete comic except that the text is still missing. At this point I merge all the layers and then add the text and speech bubbles. I always type out the text first to see how I can best fit it into the panel, and then add the speech balloons in a layer underneath. That way, I don't have to cram the text into a space that is too small.

The only thing left to do now is to put the strip onto the template that has the title, my name, and link back on it and voila - a new finished Operation Elusive Concept is ready. And when I've finished three new strips, I email them to my editors as a group.
 

 

When I'm running low on ink or don't have any paper, I sometimes draw the entire strip on the computer. I do this one of two ways: in Macromedia Flash 8 or in Photoshop 7. It's a fairly simple process and saves me the time spent scanning. It's also much easier to correct mistakes. On the downside, of course, it's more time-consuming than using pen and pencil.

When I draw directly into Flash, I start out the same way I would on paper - with a background of the dimensions the final image will be. Then I do a quick sketch on the first layer to get down what I want to put onto paper. Once that is done, I create a new layer above and do the inking - I generally use the fill tool for that in Flash, since I can choose between different brush sizes.

Once I'm happy with the ink, I delete the sketch layer and save the inked comic as a .png file for Photoshop. From there on out, the work is done the same way it's been done before.

If I am doing the line art in Photoshop, I also start with a blank document and a quick sketch on the first layer. Then I use the pen tool Photoshop has to do the line art. The Pen tool is a pretty cool way of doing it because all lines turn out nice and smooth. The problem is, it takes forever.