Comic Production Processes

erok

What makes a great comics page? What steps do comics creators take to go from rough idea to finished pencils/inks?

I'm probably not alone in finding these kinds of questions interesting. Come along, then, creative types! Spill the beans!

• Do you draw, paint or digitally compose your work? What's your favourite pencil!?
• Writer/creator's: do you write up a script first or just start drawing and see what happens?
• If you work from somebody else's script, how do you interpret it visually?
• What software do you use? (Painter? Photoshop? GIMP? Manga Studio?) How? (Brainstorming using one app? Cleaning images in another? Finishing in another?)
• What's your hardware set-up? (Wacom? Scanner? PC or Mac? Drawing board or kitchen table?)

It would be great if you could provide pics/screenshots/scans of your progress. Inquiring minds want to know!

Cheers,

Erok

Patrick Brown

My approach is probably fairly atypical, but here it is anyway. I'm a writer-artist, but I don't write scripts - most of my story preparation is in my head (given its projected length, I have a reasonably detailed outline written for my current webcomic, The Cattle Raid of Cooley, but for the previous one, Ness, I had a start point, an end point, a handful of characters, and a couple of completely contradictory legends to try and reconcile, and just started drawing.

I start with this:



I paperclip a blank sheet of printer paper to the front, stare at it for a bit, figure out what beats I need on the page, how many panels I'll need and what shape they should be, and trace my layout from the grid, using my trusty red Bic Fine biro.

Then I put the grid away and start drawing, still with the red biro. I don't use pencils - I find working directly in ink more satisfying. When I work with a pencil I find myself becoming more tentative, second-guessing myself, and when I've got a pencilled drawing I'm happy with, inking kills it. So I cut out the middle man. Minor mistakes are tippexed away. If I get a panel completely wrong I redraw it on another sheet of paper and paste it down. If I need to draw something difficult I'll sketch it out on scrap paper until I'm confident enough to do it for real.

Here's a photo of a couple of the original pages from Ness. You'll notice I finished one page in black. I'd overworked it a bit and needed to restore a bit of definition. Haven't done that since. I also used a pink highlighter pen for tone, but I've found that highlighter pens don't scan very well, so I don't do that very much any more.



I have no memory of why I started drawing in red, but it seems to work for me. On Ness, for reasons that now escape me, I converted the red drawings to black and white using Photoshop (a combination of greyscaling, multiplied layers, brightness and contrast) before I put them on the web. I'm not doing that on The Cattle Raid of Cooley - it's appearing (every Wednesday - subscribe to the feed and never miss an episode!)* in red, as drawn. The print edition of Ness (available from my website, and very reasonably priced!)* is printed in black and white for reasons of cost, as will the collections of The Cattle Raid of Cooley when they're available (hope to have issue 1 done for the Web and Minicomics Thing in March).

On Ness, I roughed in the dialogue as I went, then scanned it in, deleted the rough dialogue and lettered it properly with a font I made from my hand lettering, often redrafting the dialogue as I went. On The Cattle Raid of Cooley I dialogue it roughly in my head, leaving enough space for the lettering - but I need some idea of what the characters are saying so I can get the facial expressions right.

Here's the most recently published page:



I try and stay a reasonable number of pages ahead of publication - I started at ten, was up to twelve at one point, and thanks to my travails in getting the book ready in time for the Dublin Con I'm currently down to three. Hopefully once Christmas is out of the way I'll be able to build my buffer back up a bit.

Software - only Photoshop, although I made the lettering font using HighLogic Font Creator. I have a PC, which is a bit like the joke about the guy who's had the same axe for twenty years, and has only replaced the handle three times and the blade twice. The box is a Dell, I can't remember the specs (terrible at those things). Big flat Fujitsu screen. A5 Wacom tablet. Samsung scanner-cum-printer.

Anyway, that's my method. Anyone else?

*Apologies for the shameless hucksterism.

ztoical

I started writing a post about materials ages ago but never got round to finishing it, it makes some sense to post what I'd written here so far and I'll try and make a few comments about my own process later - feeling blah with flu right now so heading to bed:

Paper: First off don't spend a fortune on nice expensive sketchbooks for doing roughs and thumbnails, I'm not saying don't keep sketchbooks but people get too precious about sketchbooks and are afraid to draw anything in them plus when your trying to rough out several pages you might go through alot of sketchbooks which will get expensive - buy a box of photocopier paper - its dirt cheap, you can get thousands of sheets and as its just photocopier paper you can rip through loads of pages while working out your ideas. Don't do finished art on photocopier paper. Seriously I know someone is going to come along and say they do all their comics on photocopier paper and its grand but honestly if your going to create something invest some cash in decent supplies. Photocopier paper has a coating on it [its called sizing] It’s like a glaze over the top of the paper, this makes it very bad for use in creating original art as the paper is not archival and acids in the paper will eventual ruin the image.
Most comics are drawn on Bristol board, mainly because its archival [or at least it should be ask when buying if your not familiar with the brand] Its got a good stiffness to it with out being to stiff [If you want something really stiff then look for illustration board its more expensive but harder wearing] and it takes ink very well [both brush and nib].

For some reason Bristol board is very hard to come by in Ireland. Most of the Bristol you can find here [and the UK] is hot press finish [[also called plate finish] which is pretty rubbish for inking as the ink is very slow to dry which if your doing something with allot of detail is frustrating and also if you try to erase faint pencil lines after inking it usually smears or else the ink line will fade….allot. If you do find Bristol here ask what surface [vellum or smooth is the one your looking for, if the shop doesn't know I would assume its hot press]

You could spend hours going through all the different qualities of paper, allot comes down to the artist and what surface they want to work on, but for starting off you can't go wrong with student-grade acid-free 2-ply Bristol [Strathmore is a good brand] - you can find pads of 20 sheets for around $5 online.

Avoid any of the so called "comic papers" like fanboy or comics pro brands - they aren't great quality and their selling point is that they are "the correct demission with all the margins and bleeds marked in blue" Now there is no such thing as standard size anymore. Comic pages use to be all the same size as the printer could only work with certain proportions but with the rise of digital pre-press you can do your art any size you want [thou try and work in proportion to the your finished art size if you don't want everything warping on you] And you can mark your own margins in.

Scratchboard/Scraperboard: Scratchboards comes in two varieties and two grades. You can white or black scratchboard – with the white scratchboard the artists will apply the black ink themselves and then work into the scratchboard [see the work of Peter Kuper for examples] with black scratchboard the ink is already added but it covers the whole area and some people find it difficult to work with it as your pretty much working in negative [see work of Thomas Ott for examples] The board comes in student grade and professional grade - get the student grade, even professional get the student grade. The professional grade is very expensive and wraps like crazy. The student grade is alot thinner and easier to work with. Clayboard is very like scrathboard but much thicker so you can't cut it to size.

Pencils: Every artist is going to rec a different brand of pencil, only advice is to go and try and bunch out and see which one suits. Depending on how you draw you’ll prefer different pencils. I’m very heavy handed so mechanical pencils just drive me mad as they just break but someone with a lighter touch might find them fine. You might have seen rough pages done in blue pencil – this is not a blue colouring pencil [well it shouldn’t be] It’s a color-erase pencil – these are mainly used by animators for doing rough animation but its becoming more a tradition then a need as very little animation is cleaned by hand anymore. Color-erase pencils don’t Xerox [please not there is a difference between a photocopier machine and a Xerox machine] so when transferring animation from paper to plastic sheets for hand painting back in the day the color-erase pencil was used as it wouldn’t transfer, only the cleaned up animation in lead pencil would transfer. Doing roughs in blue can be handy if your doing a lot of computer work as it can be easier to remove the blue lines then a mass of black lines.

Ink: For comic work you mainly just need black, permanent India ink. This is actually alot easier said then done as most inks will end being grey and weak. Nearly every cartoonist I know recommends a different brand of ink so it does come down alot to the artist and how they find the ink. One of the more popular brands is Higgins Black Magic (NOT regular Higgins) but I know several people who think its very watery and thin. One trick if you find yourself with ink that’s not quite right is to leave some out in an open container and let it evaporate a little. This usually helps make the ink much darker and richer - shouldn't take longer then half an hour. Deleter brand ink is one I’ve personally found very good but be warned it comes in very small containers which can be a royal pain and expensive if your doing a lot of ink work. Deleter ink is also numbered on the bottle and the different numbers mean the ink has different qualities – gloss, matte, waterproof, white-out – quick check online should give you a full list of the different inks. White ink or White out is used for corrections, though some people will opt to do corrections digitally.
Sumi ink is a good ink if you want to work with washes. The ink comes in a liquid forum but also in a solid forum where you rub the solid ink against a surface with water to create the ink.

Nibs: Deleter G-Pens and Maru pens are the best nibs I’ve used personally but again it comes down to the artist and I know several cartoonists who swear by speedball Crow Quill nibs. The G-Pen is a good nib to start with if you’ve never used nibs before – you get a range of lines from it and its very strong and can take a good amount of abuse. Make sure to clean nibs when your finished, dry ink can be hard to get off from small nibs and will mess up your lines.

Pens: Don’t ink with Sharpies!!!! The ink in most markers is not archival – they are grand for quick stuff, sketchbook work and the like. Look for line markers that have archival ink like Sakura Micron pens. Brush pens can be great to work with but it can be hard to find ones with a decent tip on them. Copic ones are good but can become lose very easily, Deleter brush pens are great when new but quickly loose their tip and the lines become very messy.

Brushes: When it comes to getting brushes you should be ready to throw down some cash. A lot of the people who tell me they can’t ink with brush or don’t like inking with brush have used whatever brush was cheapest at the art store and that just won’t do. For inking you should be looking for something like a number 3 Sable brush which should set you back at least 15 euros to start. I say to start because when if you get into inking with brush you’ll look to buy the better brushes out there that will set you back upwards of 50 euro a brush. The care of brushes is very important for good inking - Never leave the brush upside down in a water container. Clean the brush around every 15-20mins when your inking not just when your finished, ink will start to dry into the inside of the bristles and this will effect the line quality. Always ink with the natural ark of your hand and towards your body, don’t bush the brush away from your body. Getting a better quality brush will make it last longer but it won’t last forever so use new brushes for fine line work, when they start to lose their nice point use them for filling in larger areas and when they become to messed up for that use them for gluing paste ups.
http://mattbernier.blogspot.com/2007/09/best-brushes-in-world.html

Other drawing bits and pieces: Get a good metal ruler, plastic or wooden ones can chip and make lines uneven. Some of the metal rulers have a cork underside to raise it off the paper and void smudges but the cork itself can get dirty and make marks on the park. A trick is to glue some pennies to the bottom of the ruler.
A Kneaded Rubber Eraser [sometimes called a putty rubber] is best for removing pencil lines without removing your ink line along with them.
Light box, depending on how you like to work a light box can be handy. Some artists will pencil on page then using a light box ink the pages on a new page.

Digital hardware: It’s a big expense but its very hard not to work with a computer these days. You need to have some sort of computer with a decent graphics card on it. Graphic tablets are also becoming pretty standard as well. Again I’m sure there’ll be a few people who’ll comment and say they get along fine without a tablet but trust me once you get use to using one its very hard to go back to using a mouse and they will also make digital work a hell of a lot quicker. To start off there’s no need to go out and buy the biggest and most expensive tablet out there – get one of the smaller ones to start with and get use to using that first. Wacom are the main suppliers of graphics tablets but there are cheaper brands [Aldi and Lidil sometimes stock really cheap ones] that are worth checking out to start on and when your feeling more confident, throw down the bigger bucks for a decent size Wacom. The Cintiq is the most recent Wacom tablet to come out, it’s a graphics tablet with an LCD screen so the image on your computer screen appears on the tablet – they are very cool to work with but super expensive. The smallest one starts at around 1000euro.
You’ll need access to a decent scanner. Notice I said access and not buy, check around your school, Work place, near by net cafes to see what their scanners are like before going out and buying one. If you can afford to buy one then by all means do. A3 size scanners are a godsend if you can get access to one but in most cases it will be A4 and you’ll need to paste pages together in a graphics program like Photoshop.

Digital Software: You can divide graphics programs into two main groups – Vector programs like Illustrator and Flash and Raster programs like Photoshop. Vector programs work on paths and everything is done basically by math so you blow your image up to the size of a house if you wanted to. However Vector programs are no good for doing colour or texture, you can do very basic solid flat colours and that’s about it. If you want to do some interesting effects with text a vector program is better then a raster one as you can convert each letter to an object and then work with it. Raster programs work with pixels so you can use texture and colour much better then with a Vector program but you need to keep an eye on how many pixels you have per inch, the more pixels the slower the program will be but the less pixels and the more blurred your image can become. The best advice when it comes to digital software is to open the program and push all the buttons – I know it doesn’t sound very sophisticated but everyone will have a different approach to using the programs and there isn’t really a right or wrong method – if it works for you then it works.

Fysh

My drawing process has changed quite a bit since I accepted the inevitable Rise Of The Machines and bought myself a graphics tablet, but the general process is hardware-independent.

I've found that I prefer to have a reasonably fleshed-out script so the first thing I tend to do is work out the story. Sometimes I can jump straight into scripting, other times I'll do it as a very sparse short story (more a beat-sheet really). When I've got the overall piece worked out, I start working it out in my head as a script, sometimes doodling thumbnails of each panel as I go to make sure the layouts don't have any horrendous problems.

Once I've got a script I'm happy with - I don't go for lengthy scripts since most of what I want is in my head, though I will usually try to get any dialogue or caption text worked out before I start drawing - I start working on the full page. I usually use Photoshop CS although I have recently discovered that I could more than likely switch over to either Photoshop Elements 5.0 or above (which is nice and cheap, and I have a copy of 5.0 that came with my wacom tablet) or Paint.NET (which is free although not quite as versatile as photoshop, particularly for text).

I've taken to working in A4 300dpi files these days, so that I can generate a print-ready file if I want to. I usually have several layers - a background white layer at the very bottom, a layer for shading or greytones, a layer for linework, a layer for panel borders, and a layer for roughs.

I sketch a rough layout of the page from the script in the relevant layer, then set it to say 40% transparency, switch into the linework layer, and start drawing the proper linework. Sometimes I'll split the linework into two layers, one for foreground and one for background, but it depends on the page.

With the linework finished, I move to the greytones layer and put in whatever shading I need. I occasionally use textures: I'll find an image of a suitable texture (sometimes on the web, but I try to keep an eye open for suitable textures and taking my own photos of them) and open it in a new layer. I lower the layer opacity to around 25-35% (depending on the texture and the colour it's going on top of) and use the select tools to trim it so that it matches the filled area I need. I usually keep textures in their own separate layers in case I need to change them later.

Once the tones and textures are done with, it's lettering time. I've mostly used the Photoshop text tool for this, but I have recently been experimenting with just hand-drawing any text and speech bubbles in my comics. I'm aware that it doesn't look as polished as "proper" text, but it also looks more personal and in the case of speech bubbles means that I don't have to worry about using lifeless stock bubbles all the time. I prefer working within one program all the time but as I've mentioned above I don't always use the same one; I've occasionally used the GIMP (although I prefer GIMPShop just because of the interface) as well as the other programs I've mentioned. One of these days I'll get around to using Inkscape as well and see if I like this vector-drawing malarkey.

My old process - before I got access to a tablet - was similar enough. I'd do the roughs on cheap A4 paper, then use "proper" paper (I couldn't tell you what brand or quality, other than it was reasonably heavy - I used to get it at a local art supply shop in Cork which has since shut down) to draw on. I'd draw my lines using a mixture of 2H and 4H pencils (never did get in the habit of doing much pencil shading using B pencils), then ink them using a selection of Staedler pigment liner pens. (I never did get into inking properly using a brush and india ink either, chiefly because I didn't want to start without having someone whose advice and help I could seek in person....)

ppsalles

Hello... Could you tell me which trademarks (manufacturers) of scrapboards in student grade exist? Ore any other clue to help me to find and buy it (the store, the specifications, website etc)
Thank you very much
Pedro (from Brazil)

Ring4Fea

Hola Pedro.

Do you mean scrapeboards?

If so Crescent might still make them and I saw them advertised on the Amsterdam Art Supplies site (in California).

Ring4Fea

Layout on copy paper

Free hand rough with 2h on high quality 2 ply bristol

Pencil rendering and finishes w/ HB

Inks with Hunt 100 , Hunt 104 and a size 0 white taklon hobby brush.

Ring4Fea

A4 arches wc paper

Freehand rough in with 2h pencil

Detailed anatomy added with HB

superlight wash of mega dilute hansa yellow as fixative with wide soft brush. Acrylic with Ox Gall fluid/water

Light washes of colour using dilute acrylics as per Vallejo not Fabry

Fabry spatter

near black basic shadows added with small bristle brush minimal blending.

Bold body colour added, roughly blended in with secondary and tertiary bristle brushes.

More spatter.

Glazes to alter colour

Switch 2 synthetic sables mainly brights to work wet in wet on contours.

Semi viscous bold colour overlay on spattery BG to add "feel" with clean bristle flats.