For me, a ton of it's by hand. First off, using graph paper, I sketch out the layout and text for the comic, just so I can get the basic page setting up. Next, using a light 4h-or higher pencil, I sketch the comic at about 200% size on bristol board.
After everything is set the way I'd like, I ink my comic with a set of pens ranging from .7mm to .1mm, and a set of black markers for the solid blacks. First I outline my characters with a thicker line, (most likely .7) this causes the characters to stand out more. After that, using a thiner line (.5 or .3) I ink the details on each character. I do NOT outline the borders or boxes in my comic, I wait to do that in adobe illustrator.
Next, after erasing all my sketchy pencil drawings, I cut out the comic from the bristol, and scan it. Usually, I have to paste the two comics together because my scanner is tiny and crappy. :P After that, I import the program into adobe streamline. I used to re-ink everything digitally in illustrator using my tablet, but I could tell that it wasn't done by hand and it just wasn't doing it for me. But now, that I'm inking by hand, adobe streamline works great.
After that, I import it into adobe illustrator, and fix any lines I might have missed before. Also, now is the time that I add the borders, text, and speech bubbles, each on a separate layer, that way I can color over the border, for line-breaks and other such effects.
Next, we import into photoshop, at CMYK coloring, and 300dpi and begin the oh so boring flatting process, or assigning the basic colors. Coloring is my least favorite phase in a comic, and it seems to take forever. On a separate layer, using both the magic wand and lasso tool, I fill in the areas of color on the characters. I have a separate file which has all the colors I use in each character so that makes it a lot easier.
After that, on another layer, I add the shades and highlights. This is done using the ‘painter brush’ -
and going over the colors with an increasingly smaller and darker/lighter brush. I usually use about 2/3 layers of light and shade for each hue, depending on where the light is hitting.
