Mechagical Girl Lisa A.N.T - Tuesday, September 23, 2008

About the comic

Mechagical Girl Lisa A.N.T is a weekly webcomic about geekish girls with superpowers, alien insects bent on world domination, and schoolyard intrigue dominated by pink-haired magical girls in disguise. It is rated Web-PG for non-bloody violence, the occassional foul language, partial nudity and references to Sailormoon. A.N.T, all characters and related insignia is copyright 2004-2005 Ida Kirkegaard, so ask before taking. Oh wait, I won't let you take my art even if you ask. Unless it's for a good cause.
Since the Archives are still pretty small, I'd recommended that you just started reading from The beginning, but if you're in a hurry, here's a short summary of the Story Thus Far (contains spoilers):

13-years old Lisa is a pretty normal schoolgirl. Not a very pretty, happy or popular schoolgirl, but a normal one nonetheless. She does, however, have a for her age slightly unhealthy obsession with Magical Girls as well as a dream to become one herself. Thus, she is more than thrilled when an alien spacecraft accidentally crashes into her room containing one very pretty but also very disgruntled engineering butterfly, Io. Immediately mistaking Io for a 'magical animal', Lisa brings herself into a lot of trouble when she decides to take a closer look at an object found in the wreck. This object just happens to be containing an A.N.T - a giant mecha (or suit, depending on how you see it) that is only the rarest and most powerful weapon of the alien civilization. Eagerly mistaking herself for a 'mechagical girl', Lisa gladly volunteers to fight the nemesises of Io's people - the termites, but she is soon to find out that she has plunged into something far too big for her to handle - or she would if she wasn't so obsessed with playing Magical Princess Sugarplum. Ba-dada-daaam!

The process

A lot of people have asked me how I draw A.N.T. No, screw that. Two people I know in real life have asked me what program I use for coloring, my mom has aked me what all these strange drawings are, and my classmates have asked me if it's really true that I don't like Liver Pastry. To answer the last question first: Yes, Liver Pastry is a horrible substance, a disgrace towards taste buds worldwide and was probably invented by the devil. As for the other questions, I've already told you.
So, for the sake of my own vanity, I will write a little bit about how the comic is made.
Most A.N.T pages start out on a Thursday. I generally already have an idea of what will happen on the page when I sit down to do it, and hopefully a layout idea as well, but if I don't, this is where it all starts. I draw each comic on a sheet of children's drawing paper (I use the well-renowned brand known as "Color Kids A4", a pleasant, ink-friendly paper to work with. most importantly, it is pretty thick and thus isn't ruined when I go berserk with an eraser) with a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil because my sketches are incredibly messy. Characters, frames, balloons, everything except for the lettering is drawn by hand on one sheet of paper and then inked, on the same sheet of paper, with a 0.1 mm and a 0.2 mm Shachihata Artline Drawing System pigment ink pen. The drawing and inking phase must be finished by Saturday evening if I have any hopes of publishing on Monday (which is why I stay up so late every Saturday). When the inking is done, I erase all pencil lines and scan the page as a b/w document by a resolution of 450 dpi because any higher and it'll kill my computer. The image is then imported into Paint Shop Pro 8 where I color, shade and letter it before shrinking, optimizing (also known as 'drastically degrading quality to please 56k users') and finally uploading on ComicGenesis late Sunday night. And then it starts over from the beginning.