Even in Arcadia is such a fun comic to work on that I thought I would document my process.  I’ve been spending the last 5 months or so really trying to get down the process of making a page. I’m sure there are some steps that can be more streamlined, but right now this is producing such wonderful pages that I’m hesitant to mess with a good thing. Since I had the insane urge to blog today, I thought I’d share with you, my fine readers, the steps I took to make page 22.

In my process, I don’t start with thumbnails, of course. I have a full script. Before I got really into comicking, I was a writer, and because of this I find it difficult to get the essence of a narrative without writing it out in semi-prose. I call it this because there are full sentences and dialogue and all the rest, but in terms of prose it’s really bare bones. I give the script to my husband Wei, the great storyboard artist, and he collaborates with me to draw the thumbnails. He’s super awesome

This is the thumbnail for the page. It is drawn by hand on regular computer paper and scanned in at a relatively low resolution. I then import it into Manga Studio and fit it to the page dimensions.

The focus for the thumbnails is panelling, composition and a bit of value.  I want to make the storytelling really clear and be able to convey emotions, mood and action with as little expositionary dialogue as possible. This page, for example, has no dialogue at all.

I like to sketch directly on top of the thumbnails in order to keep the composition and gestural movement really tight. This isn’t really a problem because I do the sketching digitally, but I imagine you could reproduce the process traditionally with some enlarging and a lightboard. Although I have seen artists do that more with the step between sketching and inking moreso than thumbnails and sketching.

Sketching is a relatively fast process, but I’m not the world’s best inker, so I like to get really tight pencils on facial expressions, eyes and other smaller details. You can see that I haven’t really sketched much of the background, and this is mostly because I paint the backgrounds in photoshop. Painting is done in value, not line, so sketching out hard lines is kind of counter productive at this stage.

During the sketching I layout the panels with Manga Studio’s fabulous panel layer tool. If I need to do any complex perspective or straight lines, I might bust out the perspective rulers. I prefer to use them sparringly because exactly correct perspective looks really odd to the eye, and it’s more natural to have several vanishing points clustered together, rather than just one.

One thing I want to point out is that I sketched Odai’s house in the background. You’ll see it disappear in the inking stage. I import the sketch into photoshop to guide my painting.

Like I said earlier, I’m no pro at inking. Out of all the techniques that go into making comics, I think it’s my weakest. I ink all my pages in Manga Studio. I feel most comfortable with the pen tools and the way they respond to how I move my hand. The next best thing for me is inking traditionally with a crow pen. I have heard some wonderful things about using brushes, but I’m just not comfortable with my skills yet. I practice with sketching, but I just don’t have that je ne sais quoi when it comes to the brush.

I focus on foreground, figures and areas of compositional balance when inking. Background and mood elements are left for painting.

At this point I import the manga studio layers into photoshop and begin painting. This has to be the trickiest part of everything so far. In order to paint my backgrounds and colour the pages, I had to practice a lot. I did almost 2 years of Anatta, where I got to make all my amateur colouring mistakes. Then I worked for almost a year practicing digital painting. Not every day, but definitely three times a week or more. Speed painting was the most important thing I practiced in terms of making comics, because it forced me to learn to choose my focus and spare the things that don’t need as much attention. If you are new to comics, I do recommend keeping the colouring simple to start, but definitely challenge yourself if you want to get better. If you want to keep the comic consistent, then practice sketches and speed paintings become crucial. Deviant Art seems to be the haven for digital painting at all levels, and I have found some really comprehensive tutorials there.

So this is the colouring process, broken down. I start by laying down a “mood gradient”. This is a gradient between two complementary, split complementary or analogous colours. By the time the page is finished, you won’t see most of this gradient, I’m just using it to blend with and keep the colours consistent. Each panel will have a separate gradient depending on it’s camera angle and lighting.

After the gradients, I grab a square textured brush and start laying down basic values in the foreground, middleground and background. When I have that to my liking, I use a hard round brush with dynamics enabled (to vary to opacity depending on pen pressure) and start to paint in the more distinct elements. I don’t use a fancy brush for this, or any layer tricks because there’s no need. Those “customizables” won’t make you a better painter, but they might encourage you to be a lazy painter. Nothing replaces some good, hard studying.

So here you can see I painted in the trees, house, ground and path. I paint all of these on one layer.

Now I lay down the flats. I use the bpelt filter to do this because it saves a boatload of time.

I have a palette for each character, in particular their hair and skin. I paint bucket them in on a separate layer from the background. With the background layer turned off (so that the gradient is visible), I lower the opacity of the flats to about 75-80% and reselect them. This give the flats a uniform feel and changes the colour composition for every scene. I decided early on that this was the technique I was going to use to visually tell the audience that the scene has changed. After I paint bucket the new colours in, I return the flats layer to 100% opacity and turn the background layer back on.

In this last step I do the shadows, highlights and extra painted details that aren’t in the background (the feathers for the guards’ helms in this page). The shadows are a desaturated brown colour on a multiply layer. The highlights are brightened versions of the flats. The added painted details are on their own layer and are painted with the same technique as the background. I start with the darker colours and a bigger brush, and as the colours get brighter I make the brush smaller and more refined.

After this I letter the comic. This page is kind of a poor example because there is no dialogue, but oh well ^^; The speech bubbles are on a layer with stroke turned on in the blending options. When the lettering is done, I flatten the whole thing, crop out the bleed, and change the image size (the original is 11×14 inches at 600 DPI) to 550 px x 794 px at 72 dpi. I export it for the web as a jpeg at 60% compression and upload it for all to read!

I hope that someone, somewhere out there will find this information useful! If you have any particular questions, feel free to leave a comment!