Something I’ve always loved to see is the process by which other comickers create their work. Usually, a great deal of steps are congruous. The above image (click to enlarge) in my personal process.
I first start with a sketch. Since my comic is now created 100% digitally, I open up a blank document in Photoshop and just start drawing the first panel that comes to mind, according to the script, of course. Generally, I like two view points: over the shoulder, or coming out AT you.
The second step is inking. Whether or not it’s correct to call it inking in Photoshop, I am unsure, but the word is close enough. I resize the sketch from 100dpi to 300dpi, and ink with a 4px, 100% hardness and 0% spacing.
The third step is coloring. I start with flats, filling in the foreground and background in separate layers. For this nighttime scene, I shade with a very dark, saturated blue on a layer ABOVE the flats, at 60% opacity. I start first with a hard brush doing cel-shading, and then I go back over with a soft brush, since I’ve never been too big a fan of cel-shading. After shading, I add highlights, steaming light (in this case, moonlight), and glowing light (around the bugs in panel 2).
The fourth step involves lettering and special effects. I will flatten the image after the third step, resize it back to 100dpi, and then save it as a new file. I find this easier to work with when lettering, and the smaller file size spares my old laptop overheating during a save. The main special effects on this page were text balloons and the “night” effect, the latter accomplished with a dark gray-blue layer at 40% set to the “color” filter above the image.
A lot of times with my comic, the third and fourth steps are kind of intermixed. Sometimes you need the high-res version to do the right effects, but I always letter at a lower resolution simply because I know what size text I want to use for web viewing. I don’t have any aspirations to print-publish my work, otherwise I would letter at the high resolution size also.
Short tutorial complete! For a longer, though older, tutorial, you can find it here. It’s five or so pages long, so be sure to find the navigation buttons at the bottom.
Making Banners: Advanced to be continued on Monday evening.
