This is part 4 of a peek into my process for creating a page from my online graphic novel, Nathan Sorry. Warning: I am not an accomplished comic book artist so my way of doing things may not be something you should model your own process from.

5. Photoshop

So, once the inking is complete, I scan the page (in two passes, usually cutting the page at the panel gutters -  I actually avoid full page images so that I don’t have to worry about all the work it takes to stitch together the scans within the image) at 600dpi, grayscale. I then convert it to Bitmap to get rid of all the page shadows, pencil smudges, etc. And then convert back to grayscale for cleaning up. Once it’s scanned in there’s a lot to clean up. Sometimes little speckles from the scan itself. Sometimes you see the image on screen and realize how wonky some of your “straight” lines look. Sometimes there are just mistakes, stray lines, rough borders, etc that need to be cleaned up.

In the case of this page, I cleaned up panel borders and tried to fix some ugly bit of inking on the ceiling of panel 3 and in some areas of panel 1 (some of this gets covered up by narration boxes anyway so I try not to worry too much about how much I hate it). Sometimes, it can actually take a lot longer to fix things like this in Photoshop so it’s better to try to get it right the first time or maybe fix it with some white paint or whiteout. I also decided that the last panel needed more blacks so I filled in the background area. This of course is easy to do in Photoshop so whenever I’m in doubt during inking of whether I should fill an area or not I usually wait til the Photoshop stage.

Once, I’m done with the corrections I convert the file to bitmap which makes it a purely black and white file rather than grayscale and makes for crisp printing. On screen it can look a little rough and since I scaled it down and saved it as a gif to show here it actually looks even rougher than normal but I think you can tell the difference in crispness from the original scan.

Original Inks

Corrected bitmap

Next, I save a new version of this file and change the resolution to 300dpi and convert the color to CMYK. In the Channels palette I duplicate the black channel and rename it “Line”. I then delete the image on the background layer and create a new layer that I fill with black from the selection of the Line channel (technically I have to invert the selection before I fill it). Now I have my lines on a transparent layer that I can paint underneath.

I create a new layer below the line layer where I’ll put my “colors”. In my case I only use one color in this book for simplicity sake, so that I can potentially print it someday in black and white if needed, and because it creates the proper mood that I’m going for. I select the contents of the line layer and contract the selection by 1 pixel. Then, on the layer below I fill that selection with my blue-green color. The 1-pixel contraction ensures that the black lines will always overlap the color and not leave any white gaps. Now I can start filling in areas with the blue-green and paint in shadows with the paintbrush til I have something like this:

If I’m smart during the inking stage, I keep in mind that some shadows and lighting effects can best be represented with the color rather than hatching. I think there’s always places though where I go too far with the inking so I need to learn to keep it simple.

Now, this color by itself is nice but I decided in the beginning that I wanted an old comic-booky texture in here. So, I duplicate the colors layer and fill the bottom of those two layers with a halftone pattern that I have saved in my pattern library. I set the top color layer to 50% and the bottom to 70% so they blend nicely and sit back from the lines without overpowering them.

Here’s the final:

I won’t get into it here but the next step is importing the artwork into my InDesign file and doing the lettering and word balloons there. Lots of times a little re-writing of the dialogue will occur as I see how things fit and how things read in the final layout.

You can see the final, lettered page here at nathansorry.com.

This is part 3 of a peek into my process for creating a page from my online graphic novel, Nathan Sorry. Warning: I am not an accomplished comic book artist so my way of doing things may not be something you should model your own process from. Especially in the case of inking which is what this part is all about.

3. Inking

Nathan Sorry is a learning process for me in respect to a lot of things (writing, the art of telling a story in comics form) but what it’s really been teaching me is something I’ve wanted to focus on and learn for a long time: how to ink my work in a  way that I don’t personally find nauseating.

If you read through the story from page 1 you’ll see how far I’ve come in only 25 pages. The first 10 or so pages are so rough that I’ll probably have to redo most of it when it’s all done to correct some ugly mistakes and to try to make it look cohesive with the later pages. I guess I actually hope I’ll eventually feel the same way about this page when I’m on page 50. Not only have I learned how to clean up the quality of my lines considerably but I’ve been experimenting with different tools and am starting to settle on ones that work for me. Yes, this makes the book look very haphazard so far but the learning is what’s important and I can always go back and correct things later on.

Anyway, I tend to use a combination of a #1 size brush, a #6 for filling in large areas, a Speedball 512 quill pen and a small Hunt nib (don’t know the size) for lightweight lines, plus a couple of Copic brush and finepoint pens for doing straight lines and some touch up. I’m really at the point though where I’m mostly using just the #1 brush for almost everything. I used to use the nibs much more but I find now that the brush is the most flexible tool and once you get used to it you can use it to pull off almost any type of line you need.

I ink directly on top of my pencils, erasing them when I’m done, as I mentioned in the previous post. I basically tighten up my rough pencils by inking and that usually works out okay but it sometimes can lead to some horrible mistakes. I’ll occasionally break out the white paint to fix things but I generally wind up doing that in Photoshop since it needs to get cleaned up there anyway. In some ways, it’s harder and takes more work to correct in Photoshop and the drawback is that your original inks are not really finished but I do what I have to do to keep making progress.

Here are the uncleaned-up inks for this page. A few things here I’m not too happy with and I’ll fix them up a little in Photoshop but overall I think this works okay. Scanning in the inks and looking at it on screen gives you a different viewpoint of the page and uneven or rough looking lines sometimes look more offensive then they do on paper so I usually try to clean a lot of things up at this point.

I originally planned this as a 3 part posting, but really the Photoshop works is extensive enough that I guess I’ll save that for a part 4.

This is part 2 of a peek into my process for creating a page from my online graphic novel, Nathan Sorry. Warning: I am not an accomplished comic book artist so my way of doing things may not be something you should model your own process from.

2. Pencils

From the thumbnails I move quickly to the pencil stage.

I’m using Strathmore Bristol Smooth paper. 11×14 size with a drawing area of 8×12. I draw everything with a simple mechanical pencil.

I start pretty roughly, blocking out the entire page in what is akin to full size thumbnails. Then I keep going over the drawings, working out any anatomy and perspective problems that might come up. I may wind up drawing a panel over a couple of times until I get it right. I try to stay as loose as possible though. If I draw too tightly I may regret it when I finish and decide that something is not quite right. Then there is a lot of heavy pencil to erase and a lot of time lost. Plus I ink directly on top of my pencils so all of this has to get erased afterwards. Recently, I’ve been trying to decide where the line is between what should be worked out in the pencil stage and what can be accomplished in the ink stage. It’s all a matter of speeding up my process as much as possible but also keeping the process interesting for myself. Though at the same time, the less you have to think in the inking stage, the better.

This is actually one of the most complicated pages I’ve had to draw yet because each panel is a different scene in a different location. I don’t use reference too much for drawing people unless I get stuck trying to figure out a gesture or some piece of anatomy. Then I’ll usually take a quick and dirty picture of myself with either my iPhone or Photo Booth like the one shown here. Even here though, I don’t use too much of it for reference. In this case, I just needed to see how the arm rests and how the neck looks from this angle but I didn’t even use it that much for those things. In other cases I’ve used the reference more closely so this is probably just a bad example but it’s the only one I used for this page.

What I tend to need reference more for is figuring out details of certain objects or locations. In this case I pooled together some images from the web to help add certain details to the locations I was showing like a bank and a bar.

Another thing I use reference for is something a little harder to typify but I’ve been pooling together various photos or illustrations that have a certain feel to them which I think works for my story. I won’t really be using these in any specific way but they give me something to shoot for when I’m working on the book.

Anyway, it usually takes a couple of sittings to get the pencils to a point where I think they’re finished. Here is the final pencils for page 25 and as you can see they are still fairly rough. There’s a lot of room here for me to tighten things up but I’ll do that with the inks and hopefully not regret that I didn’t take the pencils further.

I thought it might be interesting (if highly uninformative) if I used some time on Sketch Charlotte here to show my process for putting a page of my comic, Nathan Sorry together. I’ll break this up into a 3-part post showing: 1. thumbnails, 2. pencils, 3. inks and Photoshop. Keeping in mind that I’m making this all up as I go along, maybe someone might get something out of what I post here. Or maybe someone can comment below and tell me what I’m doing wrong.

1. Thumbnails

I’ve plotted out the entire story for Nathan Sorry and know pretty much every detail of what will happen in the graphic novel, but I only actually script and thumbnail out the action a page or two in advance. This keeps things fresh and spontaneous for myself and keeps me from getting bogged down in too much planning which I’ve found actually kills my progress.

You’ll see below that I also don’t get very detailed at all with my thumbnails. They are like shorthand or chicken-scratch in drawing form. I know exactly what it’s telling me but it probably doesn’t look like much to anyone else. I don’t even use pencil here. Just a pilot fineliner to get it down, quick and dirty. Again, if I get too detailed with my thumbnails the final drawings end up losing their spontaneity so I try not to waste too much time here. What I’m interested in accomplishing at this point is overall page layout and plotting out what needs to be said and what needs to be shown. On the left side is my script. The specifics of the dialogue often change during the lettering stage after I’ve read it over a few times to myself but what I need to figure out here is what needs to be said and how much room I need to leave in the drawing for it.  This is actually something I struggle with but am slowly improving on. I often don’t end up leaving enough room for the words (or maybe the problem is my comic is just too wordy).

Sometimes I have to do a couple of attempts at getting the thumbnails right and often that makes for a better page as I usually come up with better ideas the second time around. On this particular page, I wound up changing a couple of specifics in the panels but I knew I wanted this particular page layout so there was no need to do it twice.

In part 2, I’ll show my finished pencils for this page.