Stage 1: Script

I always write the script first. Scripts usually consist almost entirely of dialogue, with the odd stage direction here and there. These days they're usually typed, especially for longer stories that will go through multiple revisions (see up there where it says "2nd draft"?). Once I've got the script finalized I read through it and break it down into panels, bracketing the dialogue and putting a panel number next to it. This gets done in pencil, because it's apt to change. The larger outside bracket denotes where the page begins and ends. The staple keeps all the pages together. How exciting!

Stage 2: Storyboards

Storyboarding is when I figure out where everything is going to go, and if my little numbers on the script are going to be feasible. If not, well, I did say I do those in pencil for a reason. This storyboard page is from PIQue #3 page 4 (the noise at the bottom is due to the fact that they were done on the back of a piece of scrap paper). I would show you the storyboards for the page used as the example throughout the rest of this tutorial, except I destroyed them when I inadvertently used them for testing ink wash shades. Oops. Anyway, as you can see, the drawing is extremely rudimentary, merely intended to give me a basic idea of layout. I find storyboarding to be incredibly tedious but absolutely essential; sort of like the checkbook balancing of the creative process.

Stage 3: Pencils

Now for the hard part. Pencilling is the most labor-intensive stage, the part where I find the comic hiding in the white paper. I use an Ames lettering guide to lay out the texty bits, blocking in the figures in the space remaining. This is often the stage where I do a fair amount of rewriting as I come to discover that my clever and verbose characters are going to talk themselves right out of the panel. I look to the storyboards for basic arrangements, but it's not uncommon for me to abandon my original layout once I get a clearer idea of just what, exactly, I want to draw.

Stage 4: Inks

The inks stage, a.k.a. the I Just Fucked Up My Beautiful Pencils stage, is when I have to get my zen on. I inevitably absolutely ruin some artistic finery at this point, obliterating it with my clumsy, haphazard inks. I've learned to get over it, though, as adhering too religiously to the pencils yields very thin, anemic linework. This page isn't too bad, though there are definitely some areas where I've screwed something up. I will occasionally repair the damages on the computer, assuming I still notice them once the page is finished. I don't often use white-out because the markers I use for shading don't soak into white-out, so I would wind up with bald patches. Instead I try to balance inking verrrrry carefully with curbing my anal-retentive perfectionism.

Stage 5: Shading

Here we are at the finish line with the shaded artwork all done. I developed the grayscale shading technique I use because more traditional cross-hatching was murder on my tendinitis-prone hands. Because the shading markers (or the occasional ink-washing) require a much softer touch than the inking pens they don't tend to cripple me with horrible, shooting pain. I regard this as a positive trait. I generally use a combination of Letraset Tria cool grays and Prismacolor cool grays. Letraset markers have better nibs, but Prismacolors have a better value range. I prefer the markers to straight-up ink washes because it's much, much easier to keep the shading consistent from panel to panel. For instance, Archer's shirt here is filled in with a Tria "5" and shaded with an "8." I can write that down and use the same markers on page 12, and not have to worry about running out of an ink wash that I mixed myself. It's also easier to guess what shading I might have used on some object in a past strip if I can look at the original art and see that it's probably done with a 3 or a 4. Keeping the 3s and 4s of a consistent value is then Letraset's problem, not mine, and I don't have to hoard jars of diluted ink in perpetuity.