Making of a comic page

I love seeing the process other artists go through in creating an illustration or comic page, and wanted to share the various stages I go through when creating a comic. The page I'm showing you here is page 8 of Weird Fishes:



I'm not even sure if I thumbnailed out the page, but I had several reference photos for the location and a clear idea of how I wanted the panels to look, so I dove right into drawing the page on 11x17 printer paper with a blueline pencil. Once I got it roughed in, I went in with my sharpened HB pencil (image 1). After scanning, I go into the blue alphachannel, copy it, and paste it onto a new document (pretty sure there's a better way to do this) and mess with the channels and clean up with the eraser to "ink" the page (image 2). Then I start coloring in Photoshop, I like to start off with a base color (image 3).




These last three look pretty similar, but I spend a lot of my time on the coloring, possibly more than actually drawing. (1) I set in the base colors, and this time I felt like it needed something to add texture in a different, more disorienting way. (2) I took some photos of the sky, did a filter on it and laid it over my colors. (3) fiddled with everything until I got it to a happy point. The day before posting it I am sick of it and change the colors again for the final page.

If you notice, the title for this new chapter changed before I finished, the storyline taking a turn as I scripted out the next dozen pages.

Also, I love the way it looks when I take away the linework, and you get this: