Page 6: baby steps

Ok. As promised, here's some stuff about how I do the pages... First of all I naturally cut the story into page-size chunks (before I did a single page I had divided the whole chapter one, and I think I will continue doing this one chapter at a time). At the same time I do small "matchbox-sketches" of the pages to get some rough idea about the size of panels and overall composition of a spread (yes, even though I post these one page at a time, I'm designing them as spreads)

Then I start pencilling single pages. First I do the panel outlines and then place the textboxes (or speech bubbles) at this point I write the text by hand to get an idea about the size of the box. Then I do pencils. After that, in order to save time, I do inks on top of the pencils. (normally I would scan the pencils and change the lines to light blue... well, light cyan to be more exact... print the colored pencils on a heavy stock paper and ink on that... that way if I make a mistake with ink I can just print another copy and start over without screwing up the pencils)... sorry about the crappy photos. I took them with my phone.

After finishing the inks I scan the page, clean up the pencils and add contrast (all this in photoshop). Then I open the page in Illustrator and "trace" it to vector-format. I paste the vectorized page into Indesign where I type the texts and copy/paste the texts and the vectors back into Photoshop where I then do the colors... err greys.


Right. Someone might think that it sounds awfully complicated and why am I vectorizing the page... Well, in short, look the results below. The first panel is just scanned lineart (without any modifications), the second panel is cleaned up lineart and the last is vectorized lineart. As you can see vectorizing cleans up the ragged ink lines and makes the picture smoother... and I like that.


There. That's the way I do it.

Cheerio.