Okay you PA freaks, you asked for it - so here it is. You're about to be taken on a step by step tour of the creation of a Penny Arcade strip. It's a wild and crazy ride, full of unexpected twists and turns. So fasten your seat belts and hold onto your ass cause here comes PA.

The first step in any PA strip is to think of something funny. It sounds simple but this is probably the most difficult part of the process. Tycho and I don't really have a plan of attack here but we find that the consumption of delicious snack products combined with aggressive web surfing seems to help get the ideas flowing. Somehow, magically we eventually produce an idea that we both think is funny and it's time to lay it out. At this point Tycho will write out the script for the cartoon. Here is what the script for Wednesday's strip looked like:

I like to use a number 5 technical pen around the outline of the character sometimes even going over it more than once to produce the desired thickness. I then use a number one pen to lay in the detail in the face and clothes. The best piece of advice I have to offer here to any aspiring cartoonists, is place a sheet of paper under your drawing hand. This will keep you from dragging your sweaty little paws over a section of wet ink and smearing your pic. It also makes for a much cleaner image and that makes the next step that much easier. "What is the next step?" I hear you asking.

At this point I dig through my stack of PA artwork to find the pose I need for my character. Once I find it I take it and the new pic of Tycho to my scanner and send them both into Adobe Photoshop 4.0. Once in Photoshop I go to the Image Adjust menu and take the contrast and the brightness up a few notches. Raising the brightness gives you a crisp white background and cranking up the contrast will give you real sharp blacks.

In the image above you can see that I have combined the old pic of my character with the new Tycho. I drop in the colors on the characters and add the fire to the bottom. Now I duplicate the layer twice. This gives me three layers each with the same pic on it. I arrange them together and use the select tool to add a black border around them. At this point the image looks something like this:

At this point I size the image down to around two-thousand pixels wide to keep it manageable. Now I have the basic layout for the strip finished. Well, don't just sit there!

Now I go in and work with each frame individually. In frame one I change my face to reflect my obvious anger over our burning computer. I also move Tycho's eyes so that he's looking back over at my character. In frame two I change my face back and fix Tycho's gaze on our smoldering PC. Finally in the last frame I adjust my mouth a bit, bring Tycho's eyes back on me and move his arm up so it looks like he's waving the cross at the computer. once all these changes are made the image will look more like this:

Right about now, Tycho has finished his Tribes session and has begun work on the news post as well as adjusting the code to make room for the new strip. My next step is to use the select tool to highlight the background in each frame and give it that distinctive PA fade with the gradient tool. With that done I bring up Tycho's script and cut and paste the text into the cartoon. I like to use Comic Sans at a point size of eight for the main font. I keep each bit of dialogue on it's own layer so that I can move them around until I get them were I like them. I use the line tool to attach the dialogue to the appropriate character and size the whole thing down to 750 pixels wide. I export as a .jpg with an image quality setting of about 4. At this point my job is done and I pass the pic off to Tycho who uploads it and double checks all the code.