The Blind Woman and Cats
A Lucid Dream Comic
How Did the Lucid Dream Comic Get Made?
In 2023, I wanted to try my hand at a short comic story. As the basis I used one of the short pieces written by Lucid Fera (yep, that's not her real name). I had the privilege to meet her during our studies of Media Art Histories at the Danube University Krems. Lucid Fera has a blog called All Things Absurd, Mad and Random, where she records some of her dreams. One of them "The Blind Woman and Cats" particularly stuck out to me. So, I decided to draw a comic based on it.
The original story on "All Things Absurd, Mad and Random!" (go to website)
This time round, I decided to draw the panels on paper. I sketched out each panel using a technical pencil and then inked it using Staedler technical pens and markers. The hardest part of the process was to get the cats right. I used references for them.
The pen and ink drawings of each panel of the story.
(And
yes, that is a Competition Pro joystick and some cables sticking
out behind the drawing on the right.)
After I was reasonably happy with the inked drawings, I scanned and imported them into ProCreate on the iPad Pro, my currently favorite art app. I then proceeded to color the panels. Since ProCreate makes it super easy to record videos of the process, here's a quick video of how I painted the panel.
Coloring a Panel in ProCreate.
Using the Apple Pencil 2, I cleaned up the lines of the drawing and then shaded each panel in grayscales. Every time I use ProCreate, I was delighted by its speed and responsiveness. After shading I added the colors as layers in different blend modes (mostly "color" and "overlay").
Once I was done with each individual panel, I decided to use Comic Life for the layouts and lettering. There is an iPad version of the app but I found it easier to use on the Mac.
Layout and lettering in Comic Life on the Mac.
After some tinkering, I had composed all the panels and captions onto three pages and exported them as images. Please find my little comic above. I hope you like it. As a bonus, please also find below my first aborted attempt at painting this story from a few years ago.
Bonus: The Abandoned First Attempt
I actually started out painting this story in 2020 during one of the Corona lockdowns. At the time, I used Pixelmator on the iPad and again Comic Life for layout and lettering. This time round, I also used Art Text 4 for the title. Creating the first page took forever because Pixelmator for iPadOS is not well suited for painting. Additionally, I was in the middle of writing my master's thesis for university, so I laid the project to rest.
In the meantime, the developers of the app introduced a successor
called
Instead of continuing the project three years later, I decided to start afresh because I could no longer find the original work file. All that remained was the flattened and exported image. Also I wanted to use ProCreate and go for a more cartoony look.
Here is the original and only page from this first attempt.
