[ Small note: Most entries to this journal are now friends-locked. I know I said I wasn't going to lock it, but I changed my mind for several reasons. So if you want to read it, please add this journal as a friend and I'll add you back. :D ]

Because I've had a few people ask me about my page-making process, I thought I'd toss this together as I was working this morning. Uh, it's not really a tutorial so much as "here is how I do stuff", but if anyone has any questions about any of these steps I'll be happy to try to go into more detail.

Cut for obnoxious length and many pictures. :D




Step 1 - Pencils


Let me start out by saying that, when it comes to pencils, I am extremely lazy, especially when I'm working on something that I know I'm going to be inking myself. This particular example is actually much more detailed than my usual pencils. I have a habit of leaving off legs and arms and saying "Oh, I'll just finish it later when I'm inking".

Uh.. Don't do that. It's bad. Or so I've been told.

Step 2 - Inks


I do most of the "drawing" of a panel in the inking stage. This is where I zoom in to about 200% and add in the details and fix anatomy. There's just something that seems annoying to me about drawing all of the detail twice, and then erasing 50% of it, which is why I don't do it in the pencil stage. Anyway. You're supposed to vary your line weights when you ink. I don't usually do this either, because I'm a terrible person. I do try to make the lines in front a little thicker than the ones in the back, but it usually ends up all looking about the same, like this.

It's also worth noting that in this case, I know I'm going to be changing the color of some of the lines on Margensen and his plant, so I've left them on a separate layer than Aisha, Cai, and the background. It just makes things easier in the long run.

Step 3 - Flats


Guh. I hate flatting.

For those of you not familiar with the term, "flatting" is basically just laying down, well, flat colors underneath the inks. In the long run, this makes coloring the page a lot easier (since you can just select colors and lay shadows and textures down on top of them), but it's really a very boring process that I don't really have much else to say about.

Personally, I put each color on a layer by itself. Some people put them all on the same layer and use the magic wand tool to select them when they're working on them. Either way works, and putting them all on the same layer makes the file size smaller. It's just easier for me to keep myself organized if I have them all on different layers. YMMV.

Step 4 - Shading (Characters)


Anyone you talk to will tell you, when coloring, to start with the background first and work your way to the foreground. Because I am an ass and prefer to do everything backwards, I nearly always start with the characters and work my way to the background. Don't do this, it makes keeping your lighting consistant much harder than it should be. In fact, I don't even know why I color in this order. I'm just impatient, I guess.

Anyway, I don't have much else to say about this step. The coloring in these first few coloring steps is all "under the ink". I'll go back in and add highlights and special effects after I have all of the rest of the coloring done.

Step 5 - Shading (Mid-Ground)


Next up is the immediate background surrounding the characters. Not much for me to say here except that the mid-ground on this particular panel is a little half-assed because I know it's going to be almost completely covered up in text when I'm done.

Step 6 - Background


And, finally, the far background. Now it actually sort of looks like a comic panel. :D

I've had a couple people ask me about how I do the backgrounds, and it's really not complicated at all. The trees are just flat colors layered on top of each other, with the lighter colors in back to give them some depth. They're just vaguely tree-shaped scribbles if you zoom in. D: As far as making the stars not look like white pixels in the sky (even though I think they still kind of do), you can do a couple of things: the sky itself is a soft gradient, darker on the top and lighter on the bottom. The stars are applied directly to the gradient, with a light blue brush (not white) set to "color dodge" so that you get a little tiny bit of a blue-colored border around the outside of each dot. The star sizes are also varied, with more of them the smaller the brush gets. As a final touch I usually go back with a huge soft brush set to "color dodge" and about 10% opacity and just run it over a couple of areas (like the area between Aisha and Cai, on this panel) to give it a little more depth.

And uh, that's it for the background, really. Onward!

Step 7 - Finishing


After the background is done, I usually make another layer named "on top of stuff" to do the special effects on. Sometimes I don't even do this step, if there aren't any particular effects on a page. In this case, Margensen's branch and the little bugs flying around are all that was added.

For the branch, I just colored the lines white (on the actual ink layer - remember I said I saved it on a separate layer? I just pixel-locked the layer and colored directly on top of the lines) and added a soft border around it to make it look glowy.

The bugs are just light blue dots on color dodge with bigger, soft dots of color dodge around them.

And that's it! The panel will get pasted into the rest of the page and lettering will be added when the whole page is finished. @_@