Many people have emailed me asking how I create the strips for Coffee Brain. It's a refined process that took years of training and practice…I'm kidding. Like a lot of people I started out reading the how-to sections of other comic sites to get the process I'm most comfortable with today. The process has evolved several times since my first strip and I'm sure it will evolve several more times throughout the lifespan of Coffee Brain.

I will outline my process for making comics from start to finish. Please note that the methods I employ may not be suitable for everyone and it does involve drinking large amounts of caffeine. If you have any questions regarding the creation process that I did not cover here, please feel free to email me and I will try to help out as much as I can ^_^

As you can see...it takes a lot of sleepless nights to come up with an idea for a comic. The nights are long but the rewards are...well...why do I do this again? Oh yes..for the children. I do this for the children.

The only drawings I use for the comic are story boards. They are quick sketches that help me with the placement and timing of a comic. They are a great tool for anyone to use. I use crude stick figures to represent the characters and I write out the script to judge comedic timing and placement. After I create the story boards I get an instant visual of how to lay out my comic. After the story boards I transfer the idea to my computer where I assemble the comic from my archive of characters and backgrounds.

I keep an archive of character templates that I can easily manipulate and resize according to the needs of the comic. A lot of manual editing does take place when I need one of the characters to strike a pose. This is all done through Photoshop. I use Adobe Photoshop for all of my editing and coloring. I also use it to set up the cell frames and text. Once I know the layout of the comic I pull up an overall template that has the cell frames in place along with the title and copyright info. At this stage I assemble the comic, ad the backgrounds, and then do the manual editing on the characters.

After I resize the comic I flatten all the layers I use in Photoshop. Layers are just that...layers to a drawing. It's the order of the background, characters, text, word balloons, and borders. After I flatten the image, I use the "Sawe for the Web" feature to convert the images into GIF format. I'm sure there is a more efficient way of reducing the size of an image but I'm just to lazy to find one ^_^

Well, I hope this little section gave you some insight into how I do things here. It may not be the best way...hell it may not be even a good way of doing things but it's how I get things done. If you would like more info on the specifics of what I do please feel free to email me. Till then...Peace out!