If you follow me on social media, you'll know about a current project that I'm working on. It's a comic, and the working title at this point is Blue Orchid. I won't get into too much detail about the story, as I want you to buy it when it's done, but I will tell you that it's the most ambitious comic project I've ever done. The plan at this point is for it to be 4 chapters long, each telling a different part of the origin/introduction of the main character, the Blue Orchid. At this point I've written a short outline for each chapter, and I'm current drawing/inking the first chapter.
When creating this kind of project there are so many layers to building to the final piece. The first step for me is to sketch out possible designs for the characters, and work on a rough storyline. In this case I wanted to have 2 or 3 paragraphs for each chapter of the story. I wanted these paragraphs to give me a good idea about what kind of characters I would have to design and what kind of environments it would take place in. Once I felt I had both of these on pretty solid ground I would start with the actual writing of the comic.
My method of writing is to take the outline and quickly rough it out in my smaller sketchbook. I already have an idea of what the characters are going to look like, so at the point it's a question of working on telling the story of that chapter in simple drawings. I keep the drawings rough, and re-draw parts a lot. The goal is to have a roughed version that tells the story without any of the details.
When I've finished this part I send a scan of it to a few friends to read. I know they won't have all the details but I want to be sure that it makes some sense as a story. I'll make adjustments where needed, and I assure you they're always needed. I also start to do some rough drawings of the characters in some of the various poses I'm planning on doing for the comic. I'll pick out some of the more challenging poses so I can figure them out a bit before working on the final page.
Once I'm confident with the story and slightly confident with my drawings, I'll start to layout the pages. This is pretty much a larger version of the outline, with more details in the drawings. This is where I merge the sketches I've been happy with into the story. I use two different blue pencils and sometimes a regular pencil at this stage. I start off with a really light blue pencil to just figure out where I want to put every element of the page. This pencil is so light that it's hard to see unless you look for the lines. I use this light pencil so I feel okay being rough and messy with my first layer of drawings. Because it's so light I won't have to go back and erase everything afterwards.
Next I start to work in a darker (navy) blue pencil. This is where I start to work on the details of the art, like the monster's rock texture and the windows for the buildings. I sometimes use a regular pencil to work in small important details. This is often character's faces or other important features that I want to make sure I get right. I go through the entire comic in this fashion before starting the next phase, inking.
One thing that I often do while inking is correct things I'm not happy with. So while I'm inking I'll redraw some of the blue and regular pencil stuff. The other thing I'll do at this stage is correct some of the design features from my earlier pages. This happens because as I draw a comic, sometimes I accidentally discover some new design ideas I like more. I'll then have to go back to the past pages and make sure these new design ideas are incorporated. Some people might just ink these new designs into the work, but I'm not that confident. I'm much more comfortable re-drawing them in blue and then inking. At this stage I'll ink in my boxes first. You'll notice that many of my boxes are not closed, that's because I have a habit of making things fly out of frame.
Inking has always been a part of drawing that I'm least confident about. I have to keep reminding myself that I can fix mistakes. The problem when you lack confidence in inking is that your drawings can come out a little stiff. All of the practice and detailed under-drawing is what allows me to ink with a little more confidence. After inking, I let the artwork sit for 12 hours to make sure the ink is set and dry, after that I go over everything with an eraser. This will get rid of the blue pencil marks and let me know if there's any more details that need to be added in ink.
The final stage of drawing for me is adding pencil tone. This is something I like to do in order to give the drawing a slightly rougher feeling. I could do the tone digitally or even as inked crosshatching, but I felt like this pencil style of tone works really well with the cartoony style of the characters. I want my art to look like it's a drawing, so the pencil tone gives that slightly rough and dirty look. I also have a great deal of control over the tone and can do some fun pencil scratches and tone blends. This is the last stage of production before I enter the digital side. After drawing all the pages for this chapter, I'll photograph each page. I use a camera to shoot the images for two reasons. First of all I don't own a scanner, secondly I like the way the camera picks up the pencil tones.
Tune in later when I'll explain the digital process of finishing a comic page. I'd be happy to show it to you now, but I'm still inking and toning pages and haven't even started photographing anything yet.
Later