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:

BFA Gallery Show

My graduating class has put together a juried BFA show, and a handful of Weird Fishes comic pages are going to be on the walls! Printed at 11×17, they look pretty awesome, and they’ll also be playing my “Wine Hobo” storyboards, so definitely try to make it if you’re in the Bay Area. Also: there are so me pretty wicked artists in my class.

Tuesday, May 6th at 6PM.

Art Building, First Floor, San Jose State University.

If you need directions, check out the SJSU website.