I'm always curious to see what the roughs / pencils look like before the page gets finished. How defined is your image when you start inking? Do you finish your pencils or just leave your page raw and rough? What do you omit from inking and save for the color pass? Share the roughs / pencils of your favorite pages side by side so we can see the differences!

I'll start! I've omitted dialog from the final pages to avoid spoilers.

Page 17


Page 15


Page 8

I'm a big fan of “How I do it” illustrations, like these (beauts, btw) & wish more people would do them. Ever since I saw the Joe Giella/ Carmine Infantino ones in the 1st ‘Flash’ annual, early ‘60s ( yes, I’m old B-) )
I've inserted a few pages, in similar fashion - my art's never been, nor intended to be, as crisply finished as yours though. I wish more people would do it

http://little-black-dress.thecomicseries.com/comics/180/#content-start

http://thebutterflyeffect.thecomicseries.com/comics/630/#content-start

Nice, I like how freeform your process is. Do you work on one layer or many?

Nice work! I'll see about uploading some….

Full process of making an old page of Pinky TA. I don't work like this anymore.

TedGravesArt wrote:
Nice, I like how freeform your process is. Do you work on one layer or many?

Haha…no. I'm too old and stupid for layers. Well maybe not stupid, but at my age, I didn't have the patience. I did try, but got exasperated pretty early on …and I wanted to get stuff up & going before I got even sicker.
I was on dialysis, when I first got twisted brush & played with it… already post-transplant, when I started posting up.

B)

Ozoneocean wrote:
Full process of making an old page of Pinky TA. I don't work like this anymore.

Blimey ! No, good job. That looks like a long, tedious process, Oz !

Kinda like this. The first two steps are the easiest. The third takes the longest (especially if I don't like something or need some major fixes from step 2).










(I use layers including multiple temporary ones during the process. Some pages have even more for weather effects or lighting. I save every page in this format so if anything needs editing, it's an easier fix – like moving a speech balloon or changing a color or whatever. I make a lot of mistakes.)

Here's how I do a typical page these days. My process changes over time. Sometimes I evolve my pipeline in order to be more efficient, and sometimes I mix things up just to try something different.


thumbnails


mass development


pencils

inks (by Arabella Salvini)


scene and lighting setup


lighting solution (includes values and reflected light hues)


final

Wow, I am just impressed at how talented you people are!!! Happy WIP Wednesday :)

I draw digitally. Here is an example where I have not deleted all the sketch layers, so you can kind of see the process :). I usually start with an EXTREMELY rough sketch and then create a new layer and refine it. Depending on how complex the drawing is, I try to get it somewhat refined before inking. The first picture in the image below I would feel comfortable inking, but I still refine stuff as I ink. After inking, I put in flat colors and then the background. I used to do the background last, but I don't any more since I feel like sometimes the background and foreground don't really vibe well, and I like to take colors from the background to use for highlights and shadows if needed. Then I add the shadows and highlights.

Wow!
Really nice and great process from all of you. I tend to stick to a process, but when I found a better way to do something I adjust my process.

First the rough sketch for the pose (a messy one):


Next, the more detailed sketch. Here I add almost all the details:


Then the lineart. I like to use thin lines and then change the color from black to a dark brown, so it can blend better with the colors:


Now the flat colors. Sometimes I just add random colors and then adjust them:


Finally, the shading. Lately I like to use more purple and pink tones for the skin because the peach/brown colors for the skin look really boring to me (although, they look more realistic):


I use a lot of layers, ranges are from 50 to +150 depending on the art. For comic pages I use less, but still a lot. I don't show my page process here because I use a long vertical canvas and my comic is in B&W

@Avart I tend to do the exact same method, except I did not have the “skeleton” sketch shown (the one that involves getting the proportions correct, getting the composition down, etc). I can only work with a few layers at a time because I am always drawing on the wrong layer…

L.C.Stein wrote:
@Avart I tend to do the exact same method, except I did not have the “skeleton” sketch shown (the one that involves getting the proportions correct, getting the composition down, etc). I can only work with a few layers at a time because I am always drawing on the wrong layer…

The confusion that led to me giving up on attempting layering B-)

This is so awesome! I love everyone’s steps and stages. Very cool to see.


Well, here is my setup of pages. The pencils here was cleaned up. I thought I had a rough layer for this but I deleted and erase a lot of line work when I started. The rest I just ink in color lines and flats. The effects I add closely towards the end. I added dialog to show that it is from my comic. This picture is a spoiler. Enjoy.

Saw this thread and figured i'd chime in, posted a little step by step of my own art over on my DA –>

https://www.deviantart.com/thejaggedone/art/How-to-draw-like-Jagged-945129344


Honestly I love seeing the process behind art! Arguably even more than the finished product. I still pour hours of watching making of's & behind the scenes stuff of movies and such on youtube. I probbaly watched every single bonus content of every single VHS/DVD that i own at least twice. I remember the Pagemaster VHS had a lengthy making of at the start of the tape, hosted by Christopher Lloyd himself. Pretty sure i watched that more than the actual movie itself, just rewinding endlessly lol.

Concept art always mesmerized me, seeing the process from idea to finished product… all the work and thought that has to go into it. Amazing. Seeing other people's sketches vs their final work always isnpires me to get better at art myself.

Essentially a three-step process.
Sketch, linework/black flats together,
flat white silhouettes used as clipping masks and dividers, “colors” and then shading, underneath a half-tone filter.

My process is a very complicated and time-consuming one, mainly because I don't have a tablet - never touched one in my life (and there's no way I'd ever be able to afford a $4000 apparatus). I still draw by hand, on paper, sketch with pencil, ink with pen. Then, the rest of the process is digital: I scan the inked drawings into the computer; then I clean up the scans as necessary (since the scans seem to heighten the imperfections, I find); then I color, edit, separate, whatever else I have to do before I finalize.

But, what contributes to the complication of my process is how I construct my panels. As detailed as my drawing style is, I've always found it incredibly difficult to really get fine details drawn well into small little panels . . . as a kid, I used to make “comic books” where, instead of a series of small panels on the same page, each panel would be an entire page. That's how I approach my comics: each panel is drawn on an entire piece of paper, and colored, edited, whatever as separate image files. After that is when I import and resize the images into my comic page templates as panels.

Because of all of this, a single comic strip/page can take up to an entire week for me to complete.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
My process is a very complicated and time-consuming one, mainly because I don't have a tablet - never touched one in my life (and there's no way I'd ever be able to afford a $4000 apparatus). I still draw by hand, on paper, sketch with pencil, ink with pen. Then, the rest of the process is digital: I scan the inked drawings into the computer; then I clean up the scans as necessary (since the scans seem to heighten the imperfections, I find); then I color, edit, separate, whatever else I have to do before I finalize.

But, what contributes to the complication of my process is how I construct my panels. As detailed as my drawing style is, I've always found it incredibly difficult to really get fine details drawn well into small little panels . . . as a kid, I used to make “comic books” where, instead of a series of small panels on the same page, each panel would be an entire page. That's how I approach my comics: each panel is drawn on an entire piece of paper, and colored, edited, whatever as separate image files. After that is when I import and resize the images into my comic page templates as panels.

Because of all of this, a single comic strip/page can take up to an entire week for me to complete.

The tablet I use is a cheap 70$ screenless one I won in a raffle by TiaraWhy. It works well enough, don't need fancy shit like a 4000$ screen tablet computer thingamabob

Screenless? Then . . . how can you even see what you're doing?

J_Scarbrough wrote:
Screenless? Then . . . how can you even see what you're doing?

When you hover the pen over the surface, your mouse immediately jumps to that point, without clicking, until you actually touch the surface with the pen nib, at which point you're clicking/drawing depending on context/support.

It's a lot more intuitive than it sounds.

I love the work process shown here. It really shows that it's ok to start off rough as guts!
You can always keep honing and refining to something clean if you want to.

-

I started off with a screenless tablet back in 2001 I think (or maybe 2002?). It was a great big 12x12 Intous 1. That was the biggest they made then. I got really tired of the change and degradation of quality that happened when I transferred physical work to digital, since my work was mainly being displayed digitally, so it made sense to shorten that process and try and go 100% digital.

It took me a long time to learn to draw fully digitally. But I really mastered it in the end.

When I finally had enough disposable income I got the digital artist holy grail status symbol: a Cintiq screen tablet… Must have been about 2008?
I wanted to work bigger and at the time the 21 inch Cintiq was the biggest tablet you could get.

That was a HUGE regret for me. For a start it meant I had to sacrifice one of my lovely monitors in order to use it because my setup supported a maximum of 2. Worst of all I was USELESS at drawing on it!!!
I'd trained so long with a screenless tablet and loved it so much that the Cintiq was useless to me. I HATED that my hand and pen blocked the drawing I was working on…
I had gotten so used to looking up at the screen and not down at my hand that I couldn't untrain myself.

I had to force myself to keep drawing with the new Cintiq till I could actually use it. It took me forever.

These days I use my little old Samsung Tab 3 exclusively- All that tech I paid thousands and thousands for years before is packed into a small package much cheaper… I probably only paid about $650 for that back when I got it. And it means I'm working back at the same size as my old A4 sketchbooks XD

The old computer setup was very expensive. You needed a full gaming rig to do digital art so the comp, Photoshop and the Cintiq were all very expensive together. But you needed that if you wanted to work at big sizes with lots of layers and no lag.

I'd say just get a good screenless tablet. Wacom preferably (they're the only ones I've ever used, even my Samsung stuff uses Wacom). They're very affordable now and if you can train yourself to look at the screen and not your hand then you have a huge advantage over other people because your hand will never be coving part of your work when you draw.


Or else if you have a bit more money then get one of the Samsung pen tablets (TabS8 is the newest I think? But all the older ones are still great), or an Apple iPad with an iPencil.
Screen tablets are good but tablets you hold in your hands are better.

One thing I forgot to mention that also contributes to the time consumption of my process is the paper itself . . . because I use gel ink for inking for bolder and clear outlines (but not that thick line style that the likes of Genndy Tartakovsky, Craig McCracken, Chris Savino, or Maxwell Atoms are known for), the paper I recently started using takes forever for the ink to actually dry, so I usually have to wait until the next day before I can start erasing the stray pencil marks. Maybe I should just use a colored pencil that the scanner isn't so sensitive to pick up, like a pale red or orange or something.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
Maybe I should just use a colored pencil that the scanner isn't so sensitive to pick up, like a pale red or orange or something.

Light blue

Looking through all these I'm curious as to how long it takes y'all to make a page?

Like I said, my process takes on average up to a week, but if there's a particularly lot of content going on in terms of number of panels, the layout and composition, etc., sometimes it can take up to two.

There's an old thread from maybe around ten years ago, where I go over my process. It can take anywhere between 20-60 hours a page depending on setup and design required. Once a set is done and characters together posing and shooting is straightforward. Green screen sequence can take very long due to necessary editing and composite images. Have gotten up to fifty layers with figure over figure over and under setting.
Page composition and layout of panels and effects takes six to eight hours by itself, but that's the last step and after that it's done.

It's a front loaded process where single panels can take hours to get together and then with differing camera angles and adjusting composition of the elements in frame I can end up with twenty shots for what will be one panel.

Drawing would be so much easier if only my arm and wrist could take it. But I'd have to ice them for hours after doing one panel or even one character. The straw stuff is the best I can manage and that I've kept super simple and a strip can be done in a few hours.

Found the word file with the title “how I do it” 2010.

lothar wrote:
Looking through all these I'm curious as to how long it takes y'all to make a page?

When I look at the file stats usually it says from 3 to 6 hours.
Most often it's 3, if a page has a lot of backgrounds, or a lot more panels than usual, then it's 6.

Not using color speeds things up tremendously since there's so much less to faff about with.

It also gives a lot more shortcuts to getting things looking a certain way compared to with color.

My art before Genejoke colours it:

My art after Genejoke colours it: