Online Drawing Tools

Tutorials:

• Polykarbon Tutorial: Drawing Basics – If you have the patience to learn from the beginning and not futz around like I do, this is a good place to start.
• Bizarre Breasts – a tutorial/review/guide article on how to draw women so they’re not so scary looking. I certainly haven’t mastered this, so it’s good to go back to every once in a while.
• Manga Expressions tutorial by Sai – very helpful for trying to figure out a quick way to show laughter or similar.
• Make a realistic starfield using Photoshop. Nifty-cool results.
• Make a realistic planet using Photoshop. Also nifty-cool results.
• Set text on fire using Photoshop.
• Make snow using, once again, Photoshop. Are you noticing a trend?
• Questionable Content comic tutorial
• Preston Blair’s Animation First Edition – lots of pics to learn from!
• Torn Newspaper Effect tutorial using Photoshop.
• Lightning bolts – also makes great scary/cloudy background images.
• Handy techniques for cutting out hair in Photoshop, for when your art involves actual photos and stuff.

Photos:

• Google Images – good for reference to real-world objects, but be careful! They’re copyrighted to their original owners.
• Morguefile – Site filled with free high resolution photos for corporate or private use. Very handy. These you can trace from if you need to.
• Truly Free Stock – Similar to Morguefile, these are actually free, no money exchanging at all.
• Punchstock – More photos. Be careful, rights vary!
• Matrix Hairstyles – lots of hairstyles to use as guides when trying to draw characters’ hair.

Textures & Backgrounds & Brushes (oh my):

• Textures and Backgrounds – Not sure of the rights on these, but there’s lots of ’em.
• Mac OS X Brushed Metal tutorial – a tutorial for doing that nice brushed metal look OS X is currently using. No, you might not use this very often for drawing a comic, but you might want it for the UI around the site.
• Jemima’s Chevron: Color Wheel – a great web-based color resource; it also provides information about color resolutions browsers can handle.
• How to make effective use of color in websites – how to design both comics and websites with a bit of an eye for color – desaturated stuff for backgrounds, for example, makes more saturated items in front of them stand out.
• Music Notes for Photoshop CS – from Spiritsighs – great brushes!
• Vector Art: Brushes
• DesignFruit brushes

Free Fonts

• Wanted Fonts organizes by type of font – I picked up a great typewriter-style font from here.
• Misprinted Type has some very creepy looking fonts I want to explore at some point.
• dafont.com is a veritable treasure trove of fonts, and are either freeware, shareware, demo versions or public domain.

Publishing Resources – online:
See: Tools for Web Code
Publishing Resources – dead tree:

• Lulu – Create your book in a PDF format, then send it over. They’ll not only publish it, but make it available so that you can sell it! Print-on-demand is their mantra.

Dead-tree Resources

Merchandising

Teeshirts:

• CafePress. If you think of a cool idea that you want to put on a teeshirt, button, bumper sticker, or whatever, and you want to build it and buy it NOW, Cafepress is the place to start.
• Brunetto Teeshirts – if I ever get enough readers that selling teeshirts looks like something that would actually succeed, unlike my oft-neglected CafePress store, I’ll probably choose Brunetto. Most of the bigger comic sites I really like are using them already, and I am a copycat.

Buttons:

• MemeCo Buttons from Canada. Haven’t seen or tried them but I have their link in my bookmarks so I must’ve been planning to do something with it at some point.