Tools for Comics

Online Drawing Tools

Tutorials:

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):

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

These open in a new window.

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.