I have been meaning to do a blog post about how I work for quite some time now, the only problem being the fact that it seems to be constantly changing.  This will simply be referred to as my “current method”.

Up until recently, I worked 100% digitally, but I have since evolved backwards into the world of pen and ink on bristol board and am finding it an incredibly enjoyable experience. I don’t have a drafting table and instead work at my computer desk. The comics are small enough that it’s not an issue.

I draw the comics on 300 Series Strathmore Smooth bristol. I take a 14″ by 17″ board and cut it in half, making two 7″ by 17″ pieces. It works perfectly and easily fits into the already established dimensions of my strip.

I tend to not do thumbnails and end up drawing right on the board. I also don’t pencil too tightly, as I am fairly comfortable drawing these characters and like to leave a lot of it until I ink.

I ink with brushes and Faber-Castell Pitt pens. Lately this has become my favorite part of the process. I love the imperfect look of hand inking.

Once I am done inking, I scan them in as 600 dpi bitmaps. By scanning them as a bitmap, it reduces the image to straight blacks and whites. It creates a very clean image and is integral to my coloring process.

I import it into Photoshop and place it under a pre-made border template. The gutters are on a separate layer and I can slide them around to fit the panel sizes.

The line art layer is set to “Multiply” and I color on a new layer below it. Because of the clean black and white file, the colors show over the white negative space and under the black line art. I select the areas with the magic wand and have a pre-made Photoshop action set to “expand + fill” mapped to a key. I can then very quickly “flat” the comic. Most of the Photoshop work is done with a Wacom Intuous. I used to draw and ink the comic with it, now it is just used for coloring and drawing backgrounds.

Now for shadows and highlights. I make a new layer, above the “flats” layer and set it to “Overlay” 50% opacity. I return to the flats layer and go to select > load selection. This loads all my colors as a selection. I then return to the overlay layer and then fill with black. Now I essentially erase out my selection to make my shadows. Because only the color areas are selected, I can never go outside the lines. If I need some highlights, I simply paint them in with white on the same overlay layer.

I make yet another layer underneath all the previous layers for my backgrounds. I’ve been just doing a lot of general shapes and shadows for backgrounds to keep from distracting too much from the foreground images.  A nice hi-res desaturated texture file set to “overlay” helps to keep it from looking to Photoshop-y and perfect.

Finally, I letter it on a new layer above everything else. Here is the previous tutorial on how I do my word balloons. It’s remained relatively unchanged since I wrote it.

Ta-da! The final completed strip. I flatten and resize it to 900 pixels wide and upload it to the web. The whole process can take me anywhere between three and six hours depending on my mood and how much distracting stimuli I may have around.

josh