November 2008 Archive

Each page I make starts as a panel grid ruled out with a blue line pencil on Bristol board.

Then I add the lettering.  I don’t draw lettering guidelines directly on the page.  Instead, I have a separate piece of Bristol with the guidelines drawn on it.  I place the lettering guide page on a light box, place the comic page on top of it, and letter away.  Here’s the end result:

Then I start penciling in the artwork.

When the pencils are done, I trace over them with a Flair pen.

I thicken the lines by going over them again with the Flair pen, scan the page using Black and White Mode (to remove the blue lights), and make some corrections and spot blacks.

I copy and paste the artwork into a template.  Then, on a separate layer, I draw out rectangles where the panels are going to be, and run the “Stroke Selection” command in Gimp.  This has the unfortunate side of putting the Clearance Carter song “Strokin’” in my head.

Now its time to color.  I mainly use the Paint Bucket fill tool, occasionally filling in the gaps using the pencil tool.  The color layer looks like this:

Then I work on the Shadow layer.  The Shadow layer is semi-transparant layer, usually at 13% opacity.  Dark shadows are laid out in sold black.  Lighter shadows are dark grays.  The Shadow Layer looks like this:

Put it all together and you get this:

Then, for flashback effects, I delete the panel boarders, round the edges arount the panels, and start applying filters.  I use an Artistic filter called Mosiac on the Color and Shadow layers.  I use a Gaussian blur on the ink layer.

Here’s the final work:

All done!  Time to move on to the next page!