My personal comic crafting process
Ideation
Where do you get your ideas? This is probably the most common question any creator has ever answered. For my part, there is no magic. An Idea can come at any time, and often, very inconveniently when you don't have time to write them down.
Some people say this is a good thing, as only the best stuff sticks. Personally I like to write as soon as I have an idea. They don't necessarily come often, but the funny part is, they don't have to. Realizing an idea is so much harder and time consuming than having it. Therefore chances are that by the time you complete your vision, you will have had several other ideas. To put it bluntly, you need to sit down and try to realize an idea, any idea. Either you'll make it great or you'll get a better one while you are doing that. I find that building ideas on top of others ideas is the easiest path. Even if your first idea wasn’t that great, building on top of it might prompt a something awesome.
Ray Bradbury said that you should write a new story everyday. Most of them might suck but at the end of the year, you should have at least one good story in the bunch :)
Scripting
There are so many approach and they can be complimentary. I made great use of Scrivener for TFTI. It's a mac screen writing tool. It's a card based approach and it allows you to write high level notes and then dig in. It's a great tool for organizing your thoughts.
Lately, I've been trying a new approach using Miro. Miro is a mind mapping software. Basically it's a big digital whiteboard you can open anywhere. It's pretty useful to organize the story into beats. It's only good for high level stuff, but you can link google docs to it and read them directly from Miro.
Some scenes I just can't write. Namely action scenes. Usually, for those, I will reserve a few pages in the script and then work them out directly on the pages.
I recommended reading Save the cat! It's a great book about story writing.
Storyboarding
When storyboarding, I typically jump straight away into Clip paint Studio. I have a blank 24 pages project I start from. I then draw directly on the page, roughly drawing the outline of each panel. At this page I do a first pass, sticking mostly to the script. It is usually very very rough, to a point where only me can read the drawings. I will write quick notes on the drawing when it's faster than just drawing it. As I mentioned in my last update, some more action based scenes are easier to do visually than through the script.
Following that, I will move around the panels and try to optimize the general flow. For instance, it's a good practice that the last panel before a page turn is a mini-cliffhanger.
The point is to try to make sure it’s readable enough to be shown to early readers. This can lead to updates in the panels, page reorganization, etc. It’s better to make correction now because rework in following phases will typically cost a lot of time.
Sketching/Pencilling
After that, it's a matter of cleaning it up. At least fo me, it's the most time-consuming and demanding part of the process. This is when you establish perspective, check on references or make them. Quick tip: A crappy photo of yourself in the right pose will do wonders to help out your anatomy.
Inking
Once Pencilling is at a level at which I am satisfied, I will jump to ink. There is a balance here. I found it's better to start inking early, before adding a lot of the finishing details. Ideally what you'd want is enough of a finished shape that when you use the paint bucket tool in Clip Paint, there is no obstruction. It's always easy afterwards to add clothes folds, hairs, pimples, scratches and all the other noodling. What you want is a good flat surface to start colouring. These kinds of details can always be added at the end. But I’ve often had to rework drawings after finding something out in the colouring stage. So the question to ask yourself with every detail is, is it easy to add-in after colouring? Colouring can always be refined.
In the example below you will find that, like the sketching step, I make extensive use of the layers, often drawing the whole body of a character to make sure everything aligns well. I've been trying to be more efficient in that domain, but that's how I stand today.
I will make use of the colour zones as clipping layers in the next step. That is, the layer on top is set up so that nothing can be drawn outside of it. It makes the shadowing process a whole lot easier afterwards.
Coloring
Below you'll find two updated panels, long time readers might recognize them. I found a SUPER SECRET RECIPE for colouring that I'm really happy with.
Shadows are 30% colour burn with the same colour as the line work, a dark brown.
A overhead Soft light, usually a yellow, but changes depending on the overall tone I want to give. For instance, is the scene happening outside? I will clip it to a layer containing the colours AND the line work, to improve the cohesion.
A bottom dark brown gradient, adjusted according to need.
Again layers play an important role, I will put gradient layers between scenes and characters to simulate atmospheric perspective.
This concludes my little series on my comic making process, I hope it was interesting to you! If you have any questions, you can always subscribe to my Youtube channel. I try to stream every Thursday at 9pm. There is an extensive archive of past videos. Don't hesitate to pop in and ask any question, I always love to hear from readers!