PROCESS:
Many people have asked me "How do you make a comic?"
I put this web page together to hopefully answer that question.
This is how it all begins. Simple thumbnails, most of the time they are illegible to the everyday person but to me they make perfect sense. This is more of a brainstorm for the composition of the page rather than the foundation..
From here I will then pencil the page on a separate sheet of paper or board. For Black Mane I used illustration board and drew on random sizes. For the Death of Black mane I used Blue Line Pro pages. This stage is very gestural and loose. I make many of the changes here till I am comfortable with the overall composition and the flow of the imagery.
After the page is drawn it is then inked on whatever surface I was using, be it illustration board, BFK or some other board. I used traditional ink nibs with Higgins waterproof ink for Black Mane. Currently I have been using a variety of PIGMA Micron pens. After I've inked the page I then scan in the imagery and bring it into photoshop to do the initial layout and to fill in all of the large black areas.
I bring the gray areas in with photoshop. Basically just using the brightness function. I'll trace a shape of a shadow with the lasso tool then either raise or lower the brightness. This is actually pretty quick if you set one of your function keys as an action button for brightness control. If you don't use photoshop this will make no sense to you.
Once the grays look good I will go in with any digital enhancements I may have planned. In the above panel I used gradients in strategic places to accentuate the light sources. If there is text I usually do that seperately and place it over the image on a seperate layer.
That's basically it. You obviously do not have to use a computer to make comics look dynamic but it gives it a different feel.