Screaming My Lungs Out (With Nothing to Say)

It’s been awhile since I’ve done a process post, and  I’ve refined my technique since the last one. Plus, someone was asking me about it the other day, and I figured, “Eh… if I’m gonna write a whole thing on how I do it, I might as well throw it up on the blog.” So… No, this isn’t entirely an ego stroke on my part (maybe a little bit though…).
Full disclosure, I’m trying to hammer this out between deadlines, so I’m not going to get too detailed describing the things I do in Photoshop — especially with regard to adjusting channels. To summarize, to make my lines blue, I fill the yellow and magenta channels with white. To remove all the blue, fill the cyan layer with white — turning the image red. Then to make it gray again I desaturate the image on the CMYK channel. Hopefully you can figure it out from there.

Introduction
If you’re like me, you hate to redraw things — especially when a drawing is near completion. The whole point of this process is to find mistakes early and so that I can fix my mistakes quickly and efficiently. To do that, there’s a lot of tedious, frustrating prep work before pencil ever hits the bristol, but I find the set up doesn’t take very long, and I have a speed and confidence in my drawings when I finally get to those final stages.

Step 1 — Sketches:
Obviously, I read the script and get to work on thumbnails — usually for a couple pages at once. The thumbnails are drawn in a sketchbook and hugely disorganized — truth is that I’m probably  the only person who can make any sense of them. They look like this:

Each panel is drawn fast (2 minutes… Tops), and it gives me a chance to try out a bunch of different compositions/angles/ gestures without becoming too attached to any single drawing. If something doesn’t quite work the way I want, I simply redraw it. I’m mostly focusing on shapes and composition at this point, though I am giving myself little notes about perspective.

Step 2 — Thumbnails:
This is where Photoshop comes in. First I will scan my page of loose sketches into Photoshop. Awhile ago, I built a comic page and a thumbnail page template in Photoshop (available here or below). I literally take those scanned in sketch panels, copy them onto my thumbnail page template (Thumb_Template_P.psd), and blow them up to the size/shape I want them. This way, I can lay out my thumbnails “at size” so I never get surprised when panels don’t fit together on a page. It looks like this:

This is my first look at my storytelling. I get to see if my panelling makes sense, my pacing is good, my compositions are interesting, etc. If I need to fix something, I usually just draw right on top of it in photoshop. Honestly, I probably could do all my sketching in Photoshop, but I really like the feel of pencil and paper. Once I’m satisfied with this step, I play with the channels to turn all the pencils blue (this step is very important) and print it out on my home printer. The print out should fit nicely on an 8.5 x 11 page.

Step 3 — Thumbnails II – Revenge of the Thumbnails!:
I then take those larger size print outs and draw right on top of them. At this point I am not fully drawing the image. I’m just double checking proportions and perspective. When clients want to see thumbnails, this is what I show them. Often I’ll add in quick lettering so they can read the story. If the comic doesn’t work at this stage on it’s own, then there is something wrong with your storytelling. Go fix it — which shouldn’t take too long because the pages are still pretty small!
Again, once I’m satisfied, I scan it back into Photoshop. At this point, I first REMOVE the cyan from the image (which’ll get rid of all the sketchiness from the first thumbnailing stage). I then turn all my clean lines blue from there. You should end up with a clean-ish copy, similar to this (although my lines aren’t blue):
Finally, at this point, I blow up the page to full size (11 x 17) and copy it into the full size template (Comic_Template_P.psd). I then run down to a copy place, and get the thumbnails printed out onto blank bristol board. The guide lines are printed onto the paper with my thumbnails, so there’s no need to buy that super expensive “comic” paper.

Step 4 — Pencils (finally!):
After all that set up… I’m finally ready to draw the comic at full size. I draw directly on top of my blue thumbnails, and just go to town. While you should always double check, you don’t generally have to worry about composition or perspective because you’ve already done it in the smaller versions. At this stage you’re mostly detailing. I usually print the blue pretty light so the pencils shine overtop of them, and I generally redraw everything (in case I want to scan the pages and have clean copies of the pencils). With the blue lines beneath it, the final drawings usually look like this:
Conclusions:
And that’s how I do it. I know it sounds like a lot, but because most the work is done pretty small it really is a fast system. Plus,  making changes is a snap! Still, the system is always evolving, and if you have a better way of doing it please let me know!
If you’re interested in giving it a shot, you can download the Comic Template files here (or below). There are two of them, one is full size (Comic_Template_P.psd) and one is thumbnail size (Comic_Template_P.psd). I hope this helps someone out there.
Good luck!
Comic Template Files: Download

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Here’s a 3 page preview for Curtis – A project I’ve been working on for my Graphic Novel class. A black and white version of the entire piece has been printed in Figments #3. I’m not really sure how or even if you can order online, but I’ll post information for you to buy that A.S.A.P.