Wow, I can’t believe it’s been over three years since I drew a guest comic for Basic Instructions. My first was the aptly titled “How to Have a Guest Artist Draw Your Comic Strip.” Now I have an additional strip under my belt (which you should go read first, if you haven’t already), and since I had to re-learn how to draw and assemble a strip in the Scott Meyer way, I figured I’d give a little behind-the-scenes peek at how Basic Instructions gets made.

First off, there’s the idea. I try not to say the following words to Scott often: “You should do a strip about how to ______!” Believe me, he hears that all the time from everyone. But our conversations sometimes lead to an idea popping out. If he doesn’t already make a note of it on his own (and most of the time he does), I might say something like, “Huh, there might be something in that.” For this strip, we were indeed coming up with drinking game rules at the grocery store, and I thought not only that there was potential, but that I could help Scott with his workload by doing a guest strip.

The idea percolated for a while, until one day when I was trying to take a nap. Which wasn’t working, because of the cat giving himself a bath while pressed against my leg, and the other cat giving herself a bath while pressed against my head. But while I was lying there, I came up with my four punchlines.

I got up, wrote them down, and figured out rough narration for those four panels. Scott doesn’t always write the same way — sometimes he comes up with the “how to” concept first, sometimes he comes up with a couple of punchlines and figures out what kind of “how to” framework they’ll fit in. And some rare times, an almost-complete strip will pop out from his head like some kind of comedic Athena.

I worried about a strip about drinking games, and considered some sort of “please drink responsibly” fine print at the bottom. Finally, I decided to start the narration in the very first panel with “alcoholic or not,” and I went with coffee cups and soft drinks for two of the art panels. Hopefully that will satisfy everyone but the most sticklerific out there.

With the writing done, it was time for the art. The software involved is Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. I’m sure you could use other drawing programs, but these are the ones that are (a) in my house, and (b) I know how to use. As for the hardware, we both swear by Wacom tablets:

I use the small Wacom Bamboo tablet. Scott has another model. I’ve used a tablet instead of a mouse for 10 years or so, and love it. I used to have a larger off-brand tablet, but when that one conked out, I got a smaller but higher quality model. Diet Coke is also an essential piece of hardware. Or would that be wetware? Anyhoo.

Photography comes next. In my first guest strip I called Scott’s drawing process “photocartooning.” Its more technical term is “rotoscoping,” and it mainly consists of drawing over the top of a photograph. Shots are taken in the appropriate poses and costumes (Yes, costumes — what would Scott be without a black t-shirt and chinos? Or Mullet Boss without his suit jacket and unbuttoned shirt?) and put on the computer.

Tracing over the pictures isn’t as easy as you’d think. I think the hardest part, and the part that Scott really rocks at, is figuring out what parts to trace, and what to leave behind. You can’t trace every single line on someone’s face, for example — it’d look like a line-filled, wrinkly mess. Likewise, you don’t want to capture every wrinkle of clothing, and you don’t want to define every single tooth. It just looks creepy. Plus, these drawings are going to shrink down to a tiny size, so you’d lose a lot of the fine details anyway. Pick the bold stuff and ignore the rest.

Here’s a sample of one of my tracings, and you can see some of the subtle changes and things left out. I made sure to remove my double-chin, which makes an appearance every single time I make a hammy face. What can I say, I’m blessed with chins. I also didn’t draw any of the lines around my chin or mouth; those details would be lost upon shrinkage. I did have fun with my hair, however. (I’m also fascinated by how the curve of my face follows the curve of my guitar on the wall. Also, please enjoy our messy desk and bookshelves. And I moved my wedding ring to the proper finger, since it’s too big and I’m too lazy to have it resized.)

The tracing is done in Photoshop, saved as a JPG file, and then placed in Illustrator. Why, you may ask? Well, the Photoshop paintbrush is easier to draw with (Illustrator’s pen and brush can both be a little weird) but Illustrator is needed to turn the drawing into a vector format. A process called Live Trace is run on the JPG, and Illustrator finds all of the lines and turns them into points on curves. That way, you can resize the art as small or large as you want, and as long as the software knows how the points and curves relate to each other, it’ll always look the same. Illustrator’s fill-in paint bucket is really nice, as well.

Here’s our image, first in the Photoshop drawing, then in the colored Illustrator vector drawing. You can see some subtle differences in the smoothness of the lines. The Live Trace process is very forgiving for shaky hands and small errors — for the most part, it smooths them out in a stylish way.

Once all the drawings are traced and colored, it’s time to assemble the strip. I had to draw eight figures and some furniture all from scratch for my strip, which made my poor hand tired. Scott has a huge stockpile of drawings of his characters, and almost always has a drawing he can use again for most common poses (thus the title of book 2: Made with 90% Recycled Art). I did not, however, build my own framework. I used Scott’s, because I wasn’t about to measure everything and start from scratch when he had a perfectly usable template ready for the borrowing.

Although the template appears simple, it’s a 15-layer Illustrator document. Each panel’s art gets its own layer, as well as layers for the outer frame, the shaded background, narration, dialog, word balloons, and more.

The first part of assembly is a mad festival of copying, pasting, resizing, typing, and nudging things around until they fit right. A little scootch here and there really makes a difference.

Here you can see my strip before I’ve clipped the unused parts of the artwork away, and before I’ve put balloons around the words. It took a lot of nudging and wiggling to get everything to fit. I worry that I might be even wordier than Scott, which is saying something. You can see that I didn’t draw Scott’s feet, because I didn’t think I’d use them. I actually wish I’d been more complete with a couple of the drawings, because I had to really finesse them to get them to fit right. Like Scott’s shopping cart (and he is, indeed, the one who pushes the cart), which is as high as it can go without showing that the side comes to an abrupt end.

The superfluous art is hidden away with a clipping mask, and word balloons are placed around the text. For voices coming from out-of-frame, I wanted a different look than just the rounded rectangles. Scott’s template had a soft, rounded thought-balloon brush, but nothing as jagged as I wanted. So I had to make a pattern, then make a brush out of it. You can see my original jagged line on the side, and how it repeats its way around the dialog. The directional tail of the balloon is made with a > shape, made with the pen tool and lined up with the jagged balloon edges. The curved tails from the regular dialog are also made with the pen, then the pen shape and the rounded rectangle balloon are merged into one shape. (I also had to learn how to adjust the corners of my rounded rectangles. I learned a ton about Illustrator in general.)

A few more nudges and adjustments, and the strip was ready to send to Scott. I sent it to him as an Illustrator file, and he rendered it as a 600×600 GIF for the Basic Instructions site. For his strips, there are a couple of additonal steps — there’s a larger vector-based copy that gets sent to newspapers, so it’ll print clearly at any size. He also has to keep everything scheduled tightly, due to newspapers and the Cracked.com site running strips certain lengths of time before they show up on the BI site.

So there it is, how a Basic Instructions gets made!

So Scott has acquired a gadget. I’m sure from the photos coming up, you’ll figure out what that gadget is. He also has a birthday coming up in less than a week. Combine that with me and a sewing machine, and I knew what to make him for his big day.

I studied a couple of other gadget case blog posts, namely the Padded iPad Sleeve Tutorial and the Slightly Self-Cleaning iPad Sleeve. I liked the padded sleeve because no closure was necessary, but I liked the soft idea of a self-cleaning sleeve. So I built a fleece-lined sleeve that I think hits both nails.

I started by cutting, freehand, four rectangles of fabric. Two of the grey fleece (I thought about using black, but the only choices at the Wal*Mart fabric section were grey, maroon and navy blue) and two of the outer patterned fabric. I gave myself a good healthy inch on all sides of the gadget, so I’d have plenty of room to maneuver. I’d just trim the excess off later.

Next, I put one panel of fleece and one panel of pattern together, with the right sides together. I stitched across the top of each, so that they could then be flipped right-sides-out. This made a two-piece front and a two-piece back, pattern on the outside and fleece on the inside, with a nice neat lip. As you can see, I didn’t stitch all the way across the top; I knew I’d be cutting some of the sides away, so I stayed about an inch in from the left and right sides so as to not cut through any of my stitching.

After flipping the panels, I made a gadget sandwich. The two double-fabric panels should have the right side of the pattern facing each other, and the right sides of the fleece on the outside. Line up the top of the gadget with the nice tidy sewn-and-folded edges, and pin it tightly on the sides and bottom. The key is, you’re not going to sew where the pins are; you’re going to sew a little bit outside the pins. Because when you flip this thing around right-side-out, there’s going to be a little bit of space taken up by the extra fabric just outside your stitches. If you pin this tightly, then sew outside the pins, it should give you enough room for that extra fabric while keeping the pad a snug fit.

Sew outside the pin lines, all the way around the outside. As you can see (if you squint really hard), I started and ended my stitching about a quarter-inch below the lip; they won’t come undone, because I back-and-forth stitched a couple of times, and this way I won’t have any little bitty thread ends sticking out the top.

Trim the edges. And on the bottom corners, trim diagonally. That way when you flip this thing right-side-out, you won’t have big waddy bulges of fabric down in the corners. I cut this fairly close; probably a little less than a quarter-inch.

Flip the whole thing inside-out, poke a finger or the end of a pen down into the corners to square them out, and you’re done! Your gadget of choice has a cozy, fleece-lined, happy little home.

I also made a smaller one for my phone. (Different fabric — for the phone, I used the same grey fleece and some cute material I got in a set of fat quarters.) Same steps as above, but on a smaller scale. And you’ll want to stitch outside the pin lines a bit further, because there’s not as much wiggle room in the smaller format. This case fits, but it might be a little too tight.

And hey, you’re wondering — is Missy going to talk about the fabric she used for Scott’s case? Why yes, yes she is. Here’s the deal: I had it made at Fabric on Demand. They gently walk you through the whole process, from uploading an image or pattern, deciding how you want it displayed on the fabric, and what fabric weight and amount you want. I chose the 6 oz. cotton; it’s a little tougher than the 4 oz. (typical quilting and calico cotton is 4 ounce) and feels almost like a good cotton duck. I made one PNG file of the six-logo flower, and they laid it out in a half-brick repeating pattern for me. I ordered a “fat quarter” (18″ x 21″ rectangle), which was more than enough for this project and a matching phone case.

The turnaround was amazing. I ordered April 28th, was sent a proof of how it’d look on the 29th, it shipped on May 5th, and it arrived today, May 7th. Less than a fortnight from having a crazy idea to having the fabric in my grubby little hands. I love the internets, and I love living in the future!

And speaking of things I love: Happy Birthday, Scott Meyer!

My attention was directed today to Your Fonts, a site that will generate your own handwriting as a font for FREE.

I’ve made several handwriting fonts in the past, but it’s been a labor-intensive process of drawing/editing each character, then compiling them in a font creation program.

This was much quicker and easier. They give you a template to print out. You fill in each letter and character. Scan it back in, upload it, and in a trice, you have a font of your handwriting! It took maybe 15 minutes total to do the whole thing, and the most time-consuming part was writing in all of the letters.

Here’s my new font:

A little craft project that works great, and saves a ton of money.

1 cup baking soda (ordinary, store-bought variety)
1/2 cup citric acid (powdered)*
1/2 cup Epsom salts (health and beauty section)
1/4 cup cornstarch **

2 Tbsp oil (vegetable, olive, walnut, almond — whatever you want)
1/2 to 1 tsp essential or fragrance oil
10 drops food coloring

witch hazel in a misting spray bottle

* Citric acid can be found in some stores — if your local grocery has a pickling/canning section, you might find it as “sour salt”. You can also find it in winemaking shops. I got mine online from a soap goods retailer.
** Cornstarch is optional. It makes the balls float better, but some people apparently have … “lady problems” with cornstarch in a bath.

Whisk dry ingredients (baking soda, citric acid, salts, cornstarch) together until well blended. You may need to sift your powdered ingredients to get rid of clumps.

Mix wet ingredients (oil, fragrance oil, food coloring). Add slowly in little bits (maybe one teaspoon at a time) to the dry stuff. Smoosh it around well with your hand, or whisk it, until the color and liquids are evenly distributed. If you add too much liquid at once, you may start the fizzing reaction prematurely. You can listen to the mix to see if it’s fully blended.

Hopefully, you’ll have the consistency of wet sand, and it will stick together when you press a clump in your hand. If not, then spritz lightly with witch hazel, three spritzes or so and then mix again, until it’ll hold together.

Use a two-part plastic Xmas ornament (I got mine at Michael’s Crafts for 89 cents). Pack the mix into each side, then pile extra on top. Press firmly together. Wipe the excess off the seam, then gently remove the mold.
Your ornament halves should come off easily and cleanly. If not, your mixture might not be quite damp enough. Spritz a couple more times, mix, and try to mold up again.

Your ornament halves should come off easily and cleanly. If not, your mixture might not be quite damp enough. Spritz a couple more times, mix, and try to mold up again.

Put the balls on a cookie sheet (I covered mine with foil, for easy cleanup) to dry. Don’t put them on a paper towel — they’ll stick. Lesson learned the hard way. You can dry them a bit faster if you put them in a warm oven — just turn the oven on to “warm” for a couple of minutes, then turn the oven off. Put in your tray of bombs — with the door closed, the oven will stay warm for quite a while.

24 hours later, you have fizzy bombs ready for a bath!

Earlier in the week, I learned that my friend Meg had done a DIY screen print technique. As I’ve been interested in screen printing for quite some time, I was delighted to find out how she did it, and to try it for myself.

Here are the supplies I used. Everything but the ink was around $10; the ink can be had for around $6 per 8-oz. jar, but I got a 6-color basic package of 4-oz. jars for $17.99. I got new blank shirts at Target for $5 each. The ink will last a long time, I barely touched the jar of black for this shirt.

The first step was to clamp a piece of material into the embroidery hoop and pull it tight, screwing the hoop down tight to keep everything nice and taut. I got a remnant of sheer curtain fabric for 60¢ (should be able to do about 5 screens with it) and the embroidery hoops were 89 cents each for the 9-inch jobbies.

It was tough to decide what to use for my first try; it needed to be something bold that could be done in just one color. I grabbed a photo of Boba Fett’s mask from the internet, then traced over it in Illustrator to reduce it down to black and white. You could take any image or photograph and run it through a Photoshop filter to get it down to just two colors. It took a few tries to get it printed in a size I liked.

Next up, put the stretched fabric over the printed image and trace over the lines with a pencil. A duller pencil works better; my really sharp one tended to pull the threads of the fabric.

The finished pencil drawing on the stretched fabric.

This was the most time-consuming part; blocking out the areas of the screen that aren’t to be printed. This is where the Mod Podge glue comes in; using a couple of different brush sizes, I painted the glue on the fabric. Being incredibly anal, I did three coats of glue to make sure there were no holes or gaps left. The glue rinses off when wet, but is impervious to water when dried. Even though I was totally uptight about getting it right, it still only took around an hour to complete the screen.

The pants hanger is now my best friend when it comes to the screen. It made it mighty easy to leave the glue to dry. I just let it dry overnight, but supposedly the glue sets up in less than an hour.

Printing time! I put the screen where I wanted it on the shirt, and got ready to ink. The binder clip you see on the collar is holding a sheet of paper inside the shirt. Just in case the ink goes all the way through, it wouldn’t then stain the back of the shirt. I didn’t really need to worry, it turns out — the ink doesn’t go all the way through the shirt, but is more of an acrylic paint texture, and sits on top of the shirt.

Then I slathered the ink all over the open parts of the screen. I used a bristly brush to poke the paint down into the screen. I know now I still didn’t poke hard enough, since some areas came out lighter or a little blotchy. Next time I’ll really cram the ink down in there, so it goes everywhere it’s supposed to on the shirt. I ended up filling in a couple of spaces just using a brush on the shirt after I peeled back the screen.

The ink rinses away with water when it’s still wet; cleaning the screen was surprisingly easy. Though the black ink did color the open parts of the screen a bit; oh well, it makes it easier to see what parts are blocked off. Here are the finished shirt and the cleaned screen drying over the bathtub. The screen dried beautifully, and is ready for Scott to try his hand at painting his own Boba Fett shirt.

Once the ink dries, just slap a piece of paper on top and iron the front and the back for 3-5 minutes. We’ll see how it washes!

Copying Pants: I browsed around online, looking for a way to make new pants from an existing pair. Most links started out by having me rip apart the existing pants and making a pattern from them, which isn’t about to happen. A few others mentioned using masking tape, although no tutorials were forthcoming. So I made my own masking tape tutorial.

Here’s the original pair of pants — some black capri cargoes. The fashion mavens of What Not to Wear would probably tell me that they’re totally the wrong length for my short legs, but I love them anyway. The length doesn’t matter, though — you could take comfortable shorts and make them into pants, if you wanted. I love these pants primarily because of the fit at the waist and hips — I’m very much a pear shape, and it’s hard to find pants that fit well in both spots.

First off, lay your original pants down on a flat surface (I used the bed). Most pants are made with four quarters — two on the front and two on the back. You’ll need to copy one of the back panels and one of the front panels. I put quite a bit of tape down, so my tape copy would be stury when I peeled it off.

Now you have a copy of the pants. Peel your tape off carefully and lay it down flat, sticky-side-up. Be sure to peel apart any places where the tape is sticking to itself, so you get an accurate copy.

Take newspaper (or if you’re like me and don’t get the newspaper, you can use the advertising flyers the postman keeps stuffing in your mailbox) and lay it down over the sticky side of the tape. Make sure you cover all of the tape, and make sure your newspaper extends at least an inch beyond the outer edge of the tape.

Flip the whole shebang over and outline the outside edge of the tape (you can see here I used black Sharpie). Then cut out your pattern pieces, giving yourself a seam allowance beyond the outside edge of the tape. I did a fairly typical 5/8″ seam allowance, but you may want to make it even larger.

Huzzah! Now you have pattern pieces for pants! You can either go straight to constructing the pants, or you can make a softer, gentler pattern piece. I have a roll of plain white muslin, very cheap stuff, so I pinned the stiff, heavy newspaper pattern to the muslin and created a more permanent, easier to store pattern from pieces of muslin.

I constructed a test pair out of muslin to make sure everything fit right. I used big loose stitches with my sewing machine, then picked the stitches apart after trying them on. All you need for your pattern is one piece for the front and one piece for the back. When you make the pants themselves, you’ll want to have folded fabric, right sides facing each other, so you can cut two pieces at once with your pattern piece.

Your pattern can be one length, but you can make pants of different lengths. All you need to do is continue your straight lines from the pattern downward if you’re making pants, or cut your fabric shorter on the bottom for shorts.

And now comes the artwork! This is easier than taking pictures of the sewing process. The first part you’ll want to sew is the crotch area — keep the two back halves with the right sides together, wrong sides out, and stitch up the crotch. Likewise the front pieces. If you’re super-anal, like me, you can then finish your seams by flattening the seam allowances to one side, turning the pieces right side out, and stitching along the outside.

Next, put the front and back together, right sides together. Sew up the outsides (1 & 2) first, and if you want, finish those seams neatly. Then sew up the inseams (3) last. When pinning the inseams together, start at the middle, where the ends of the crotch seams meet. These seams can be a toughie to finish flat, but if you roll up the legs, you can get the fabric crammed far enough under your machine’s presser foot to get all the way up to the crotch — then you can finish one leg at a time. Even though it’s hard, I totally recommend it — it’s much nicer having flat seams on the inside.

At this point, you can turn the pants right side out and try them on. You can either turn down the hem along the top and have a very plain waist, or you can add a waistband. I opted for a waistband. Take a long strip of fabric, four times the width of the finished waistband width. Fold in half, press. Then fold each half in half again and press. The goal is to have a nice sturdy band that you can clamp around the top of the pants. If you’re using stretchy fabrics, you can put elastic inside this waistband, and you don’t have to worry about buttons or a zipper.

For the bottom hem, you can either turn it under or turn it out and stitch it down — if you have a fabric with a cool contrasting pattern on the inside, you may want to turn it out.

If you do pants with a zipper or button fly, you’ll have those pieces on your pattern. On each side, turn half of the flap inside and stitch down — now you can put button holes on one side, and buttons on the other.

My first try was with this pair of shorts — For the bottom hem, I turned the fabric to the outside to show off the contrasting pattern on the “wrong” side.

Then I lengthened the pattern to make pants — I even made the legs wider, which makes them SO COMFY. I turned the bottom hem inside, which gives it a cleaner look.

I specifically got this awful fabric for this experiment — it was on sale for a buck a yard. For the shorts, I probably only used a little over a yard (since I was able to cut the pattern along the fabric width), while the long pants took a little over two yards (with the pattern cut along the fabric length). It’s perfect for loungewear — shiny and smooth on the outside, and soft like flannel on the inside.