Back in January of 2004, these guys were easy to create, and I was able to make them daily. I was on a schedule, so quantity over quality was the rule. Sometimes I miss doing it like this. At one time there actually were female characters in my webcomic. In fact, I was quite fond of them, but the protuberances that jutted from their pectoral region gave me a special problem. To understand this problem, you really have an understanding of the bizarre manner in which the characters are actually forged.

In the early days, I was making an obvious yet stylized stick figure. The “sticks” were given a quasi 3D effect using the “Cutout” tool with the blur set to max. Mixing it with other effects, it was a unique style that appealed to me. Almost from the start, I knew that this would be my trademark style, and so I stuck with it.

Early on I started to feel the need to improve the comic by adding more backgrounds, props, speech balloons, and yes… faces. Eventually I realized that gender was going to have to be addressed. The easy answer was breasts. It is a recognizable marker for gender identification. Unfortunately they were freakishly out of proportion, but you’ll have that.

And then came the dream… What if they were able to be puffed up? Made larger? Thicker? Less stickly? In restropect, the problem wasn’t really that difficult. I could still use the “cutout” tool, and combining it with libraries of ready made cut and paste poses, backdrops, and props, I would be able to keep up with the daily schedule. The trickiest part was the breasts… But pasting them on after the fact and quick brush of the soften tool made it quick and easy enough.

By this point the characters were really starting to look quite substantial, but they still had a highly pixelated appearance. I was working at a resolution that was very low, and  it caused a lot of unintended jaggies in the finished work. Now for the problem: The cutout tool was not effective for shapes beyond a certain resolution. So how was I supposed to do this? How could I make my characters with that 3D effect in High-Def?

This example pretty much shows you how it runs. I actually work at much higher resolutions than you see here, but I tried to show the problem with the breast, and how I've tried to deal with it. After all, you wouldn't want razor sharp tits, nor would you want blurry boobies.

The answer didn’t come easy. In fact, it’s the main reason why I don’t do the comics daily anymore, and it’s also the reason that until now I haven’t attempted to re-introduce the female characters. The trouble was the breasts. They shadow. Shadows are easy enough to make by blending and blurring, but half the breast had to have sharp clearly defined edges, and the other half needed to fade into the torso. Oh, sure I could have just done it all by hand, but there has to be a formula from which I can rapidly get consistent results. It’s not quite perfected yet, but I think I’m pretty close now.

One incredibly good thing did come out of it: Characters could now be shown wearing patterns like PFC Knaw’s Army uniform.