So, as you may have noticed, the comic has skipped a few weeks. While it’s partly because my life has gotten busier, the pages have a lot more detail than they once did, and so they take quite a bit longer to produce. So, I decided to show how I go about making a page.

The first thing I do is write down the dialog in another document. What happens on the page largely depends on what’s said, so having a rough idea of the lines, even if the wording changes, which it often does, is very important for a basis. Think of it like a screenplay.

After that, the very first thing I do is put in the panels. Sometimes, like in the middle of this page, the negative space will be used as a panel itself, but overall the panels themselves dictate how the comic itself is read, so having there be a clear order is very important. I tend to use six panels per page, as its a good middle ground between having too much empty space and being too cramped to fit anything in the panels themselves.

 

Next, I do the character outlines. This is actually one of the quicker steps – while getting the perspective right can be rough, once the lines are down theres not much more to do. Each panel has its own folder, that the outlines and colors for that panel are stored in, making it easier to organize. You’ll notice that Akila on the right hand side is cutting through the panel break – the panels themselves are on their own layer, which I’ll explain more about later.

 

 

 

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fter this, I color the flat base in for the characters. Each character has a preset color pallete I have saved, with the order of hair-skin-eyes-mouth-clothes as a general rule, since I cant name the colors themselves. This is probably the fastest step as its just using the fill tool over and over.

 

Once that’s done I begin the long and slow shading proccess. First, I start with coloring every area I want darker in red on a layer independent to all the others, and fill the dark areas in. Black outlines don’t get filled as they never change tone. Additionally, this is only for characters, background objects get filled in much later. This part takes probably the longest as its hard to work out just how shadows should be in each panel, as it can often vary depending on where people are standing and the direction they face.

 

Once that’s done, I color in the areas designated to be shaded with the color’s respective dark variant. This is where those color palletes start to come in real handy – each color is followed by the one used for shading, so it keeps everything consistent. I then take the layer with all the shading, and break it apart into a layer for each panel, and move it into that panel’s folder.

Now that the foreground is mostly finished, it’s time to move on to the background. This one can be time consuming as well, especially when perspective and detailing is involved, and is partly why I like drawing such varied enviroments – it stops it getting boring. You’ll probably notice the left three panels don’t have their backgrounds yet – thats because those have the wood I use for scenes within the tree as background, which is just a big png (the one used for the website’s background) that I cut sections out of and stretch to fit the perspective.

 

 

 

 

 

After this, I color in the space between the panels, and detail any art that is in the negative space, in this case being Akila. I could probably write how I do my glow effects in a lot more depth, but this is already long enough. Simply put, I just randomly use color blending until it looks good. I also touch up any errors or things missing at this stage, as it becomes harder to fix mistakes during the next step.

 

The Penultimate step is adding the darkness gradients, and in my opinion where the comic starts to look actually good.  There’s a lot of nuance to how I do it – some scenes have lighting thats a specific color, e.g. the char having orange color overlays tinting everything slightly, but again, thats probably outside the scope of this explanation. There are also a few things that are, as a rule, unaffected by darkness or color overlays – Akila’s eyes and magic auras are two big ones.

After that, the last thing to do is add text. This can be rough, as I tend to write and re-write the same sentence in twenty different ways until I’m happy with it. Then it’s saving it, and posting it here! 

And thats how I make one of these pages. It takes a longer time now, but im much happier with the end result, which I feel is more important. Also I made an animation of each step!