Tag Archives: frederique

What I’ve learned from a Facebook marketing campaign

To get more attention and hopefully, eventually more likes for Frederique’s Facebook page, I’m running a small marketing campaign in the last two weeks of the year. Here are some of my findings, a little after halfway through.

(Preface: the campaign is for winning free posters. For that, one only needs to share anything from the Facebook wall or like the giveaway’s post. More info about the campaign here.)

First, the campaign is set to run in the last 18 days of the year, within the most noise around – when everyone is already immune to ads. This was clearly not great timing, and I will avoid this in the future whenever possible. 

Second, I scheduled the post to go online on a Thursday, when I saw most of my peers active on Facebook. Also, I’ve let some close friends know about the post immediately and asked them to like or share it to gain more visibility. This worked well: some people liked the post a day later as well, showing that it was among the important ones (sharing it as an image probably added some extra points to its rank).

Third, my optimistic webcomic has a very special audience: almost every person is a potential follower, and therefore it was almost impossible to foresee the new followers. (This also means that I will have next to no chance narrowing down the audience for a future ad campaign based only on gender, age or similar values).

Fourth, the helpfulness of my friends is fantastic: their shares, likes and comments helped to show Frederique to hundreds of people in a week and meet the very modest goal of reaching the magic number – 50 followers of my Facebook page.

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Breaking: Frederique for iPad in Emanata

Emanata is a great new app to discover indie comics and emerging artists. From today, your ol’ man is among those visual storytellers featured in the app – this, looking at all the others drawings, is a great honor.

Frederique will come every two weeks to Emanata. I have to admit, I’m really excited about working with this new format.

Get the app from the iTunes.

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Drawing a weekly comic with the iPad

The first time I drew Frederique was about ten years ago, and since then, my preferred drawing technique didn’t change much: on paper, with ink or a black rollerball pen. As a disaster, I didn’t have access to a scanner the night the first episode should have been released, therefore I was forced to rethink my options – and I fired up the iPad.


From the first touch to the last: drawing on iPad, correcting vectors and finalizing graphics

There were of course plenty of other options: I could have reused my old drawings, or chose a more familiar digital tool like Photoshop or Illustrator. I wanted to go for something handmade though, and drawing with fingertips is quite similar to using a real pen – just that it has a built-in cheat, the option to correct the lines later. (But yeah, isn’t the eraser made for the same thing?)

This wasn’t the first time I used the iPad to do drawings though. I had a few goes with tons of apps, both raster- and vector-based. Because I wanted to have the comics in color, I went for the vector-based option, using neu.Notes+ (currently for 0.99$). This is a brilliant little app with great drawing tools and with a killer feature: it exports PDF files to Dropbox which can be directly fed into Illustrator from there – so that everything I draw with my fingers can be later edited with a professional tool that I use on a daily basis.


Tools optimized for touchscreens (neu.Notes) and trackpads (Illustrator)

Even with the already known tools, I’ve spent about 8 hours on the first episode: drawing, redrawing, checking on the computer, redrawing and finalizing the vectors on the iPad (unfortunately at this time, the PDF files cannot be transferred back), correcting the vectors in Illustrator, coloring, adding shadows and more details, and exporting the whole lot from Photoshop.

Since then I made ten episodes and some more images, practiced the finger-drawing and optimized the workflow a lot – now I’m down to around 4 hours per episode, which is about pen-and-ink-time. And there’s something even better to this process. Thanks to the vector-based graphics, I have a lot more options open: maybe one day we will see all these characters filled with life – and dancing in a cartoon.

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Frederique is back

Teenagers have dreams about drawing famous comics – or was it just me? Whichever it is, I was drawing like crazy with the age of 18.

Those first strips were of course boring, but the main character, Frederique was already there. A few years after, with a help of a friend some more characters were born: a talking chicken in the fridge, some guys always high on weed, and one who was similar to a goofy guy we both knew. Most of them never actually appeared in any of the strip – but the basement has been done. And now it’s time to build the house. (Evil laugh.)

For now, Frederique will appear on it’s Facebook page, and I’ll figure later how to make it part of the blog.

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