Heya everyone!! Here's something I've always wanted to do: A step-by-step writeup on my process for making a page!
This first time around, I'll be writing about Chapter 2 Part 1 Pg. 105. This one's a full-page spread, meaning my process was a little different than how I would make a typical 4~7 panel page, but I'd love to do more write-ups in the future showing how I plan different kinds of comics. Also, I'm using a different painting style than usual, which I developed over the break, so I'm kind of walking things through to myself as much as I am to you.
Let's get to it!
Every page for me starts with a thumbnail. I've blown it up to the size of a regular page here, but I draw these small, hence the name. The benefit of thumbnailing is that you can focus on the layout of a page without worrying too much about the details. I'm a bit of a zoomer -- that is to say, when I make digital art, I zoom in and out constantly -- so working at a very low resolution on purpose prevents me from zooming in too much and fiddling.
I didn't actually do thumbnails until very recently -- I only started about 10 pages ago -- but I'm totally hooked on it now. I think my compositions have gotten a bit nicer as a result, and it makes the sketching phase go a lot smoother to have an idea from the outset of how things need to be laid out. There's nothing worse than having to throw out a sketch you've been working on for hours because it just doesn't work with the composition!
Next, I transfer the thumbnail to the actual full-resolution file I'll be working on, and begin penciling. (It looks a little more blurry 'cause I forgot to save a hi-res snapshot, so this and the next two are screenshots, but trust me, this page is 600dpi!) Not much to say here -- I could write a whole post longer than this one about how I sketch human(oid)s, but for now, I'm basically just tracing the thumbnail in higher detail. I refined Fenic's pose a bit to match her dialogue more -- she's a little frazzled, leaning over in contemplation, surreptitiously feeling the back of her head for a bump.
This is also the point in the process where I realized that I was going to have to draw Fenic and Xiaolei twice -- once above the water, and once again for their reflections. See, if I just flipped them vertically and reused the same drawing for the reflections, the perspective would look a little strange. The horizon line in this illustration is above the characters' feet, meaning that their reflections in the water are even further below, and should be subject to substantial perspective skewing. Normally I wouldn't bother going that far, but in this case I wanted their reflections to be crystal clear, so I went ahead. In green here is a kind of pre-sketch I did based on lightly editing the reflected version from the thumbnails to be in-perspective.
...And here they are, fully fleshed out. I also completely redrew Fenic's right-side-up image to make her pose a little stronger, and match the reflected version better. There was a long back and forth here where i kept comparing the upside-down and right-side-up versions to make sure they matched -- some violet arrows I scribbled as notes to myself remain here.
Fenic's skirt is really short. Cute, right? Well, I designed this outfit years ago, so I suppose I'm reaping what I've sewn.
Here you see me roughing out the background. I'm usually not as detailed with backgrounds in my sketches as I am with characters -- with natural landscapes like this, I usually just lay things out roughly for the painting process. Fun fact: It's way easier to paint a tree than it is to sketch a tree.
The clouds here are also for layout purposes -- I knew I wanted to make sure they had a strong sense of direction to them, so that they would draw the eye to the characters, so at this point I just put down some lines.
I stuck the mountain right in the middle, it seems. Hmm...
The last stage of the penciling process, where I'm just adding in details here and there, experimenting. I sloppily rearranged some of the background in the upper-left with the selection tool, and didn't even bother to re-connect the clouds or the side of the mountain. Sketches don't need to be pretty! They just have to work for you.
At this point you can tell that I tend to use a lot of different colors when sketching -- it helps to separate out background and foreground elements when everything's still just line-art. (My default sketch color is usually violet or blue... there's no reason for that, other than that I find it pleasant to stare at for long periods.)
Now finally onto the painting process! Or are we...? Actually, none of the pixels you see here made it to the final image. They weren't supposed to -- this is a kind of pre-painting that I've been calling a "color sketch." I'm blocking out the landscape and characters in a big ugly round brush purely so that I can see how the colors work together.
You can also see at this point that I decided to shift the mountain over to the right a bit, to be a little more rule-of-thirds-y. Note that Fenic's eyeline now intersects the reflected mountaintop.
I spent an unusual amount of time on the color sketch for this one, because I wanted to make sure the palette was just right. Here I'm fiddling around with clouds and speckles in the water. Incidentally, the clouds and water are dyed amber with pollen -- flecks of which are floating atop the surface in this pic. That's one of this setting's distinguishing features, so I try to work bright yellows into every page.
Note that the background elements -- the cliffs mainly -- are shaded differently from the characters in the foreground. I wanted really dark shadows on the cliffs to impress the brightness of the sunlight, but I wanted the characters to be shaded a little more subtly. So... I just did that! Sometimes inconsistency looks bad, sometimes you go for it intentionally.
Some more tweaking of colors, and I've started to put together a little palette in the middle. I'll take that palette with me into the actual painting phase, and I will reuse it in later pages too -- that way, I only need to do this color-sketch process when the scene changes or I need new colors.
The color sketch is finally done. I muted the colors a bit by applying a slight brown color filter, which is now baked into the palette. I have a tendency to go overboard on super-saturated colors; I think it's because my old Cintiq's screen is a tiny bit washed out. With all the colors pushed slightly towards brown, the warmth of the sand and cliffs comes out, like they've been baking in the sun all day.
Oh yeah, I also re-did the watermark I've been using for years in the same font I set the dialogue in. It looks a little more cohesive that way. (It used to be set in Ubuntu Condensed. Listen -- I'll say it a thousand times -- Ubuntu is the premier humanist sans-serif font for computing, and it's free!!! Probably not great for comics though.)
Now I throw all that work in the garbage and start the real painting with the palette I assembled! As always, I do the characters first. This is where that "new process" I mentioned starts to come into play. The details would again fill a whole one of these posts to get into, but I'll give a short overview.
This is actually very, very similar to the process I used all throughout the Prologue, Chapter 1 and the first half of Chapter 2 Part 1. Using a fully-opaque brush with no anti-aliasing (very important!!), I carefully create areas of solid color and fill them in. Fenic's hair, then her face, then her shirt, etc., in flat color. Then, I add details and shade using the same brush. When shading, I draw only from the colors I picked out for the palette in the color sketch phase -- I don't use blend effects like alpha transparency, multiply, etc.! This is purely a personal choice, but in my opinion, having precise control over how colors change from areas of light to areas of dark gives me the most bang for my buck.
As for how the process differs from the one I used for most of the rest of the comic, the changes are pretty slight; this is the note I wrote for myself as I was experimenting earlier this month:
(notes to self) rules for replicating the look of these paints:
- hand-selected palette, no multiply/screen/etc layers
- two-tone shading pattern, with distinct "penumbra" highlighted by a slightly offset hue
- lines only between areas separated on the z axis, or on the sides of shapes facing away from a light source
- consistent stroke widths, no fine lines or points
- the messier the brush, the better
Of these, I would say the "consistent stroke widths" rule is by far the most important change. For this painting, I set my brush diameter to 15 pixels and left it there, resisting the temptation to shrink it down to cram in fine details. The result is that there are no details on this page finer than 15px (mostly). I really like the way this looks -- it's very easy to constantly tweak your brush size when you're doing digital art, but if you're not careful, it can lead to a lack of visual cohesion. By forcing all details to be at this particular size, it gives the impression that fine details are being dilated, and also makes you more thoughtful about what to include or not include.
...Well, that's my "short overview!" Anyway, onward:
Painting in more stuff. Nothin' special to talk about here. Well, maybe the sand! So, to lend that sandy texture, I used a straight-up pixel spraycan tool, MS Paint style. I did this in several passes, using lighter colors closer to the horizon and larger "grains" closer to the camera. Looks alright! This is also how I do stars in night scenes, and how I'll apply the grains of pollen to the surface of the water later.
This is the point in the process where things really started to feel like they were coming together. With all of the major scene elements painted in, I was getting pretty excited for how this page would turn out. The mountain in the background has the roots of an unimaginably huge tree-stump clinging to it. All in all, this area gives a bit of a "pacific northwest" vibe, but note the total absence of green on the page.
I used a Bob Ross sorta method on those trees. Relaxing!!
Finishing up the mountain and working on clouds. I had to do a lot of experimenting to come up with this general pattern for the clouds -- because the whole scene is reflected at an angle in the water, I had to figure out an arrangement for the clouds that wouldn't cause trouble above or below the horizon. I think what I came up with leads the eye nicely around the page, though I did more tweaking after this.
I actually "cheated" with the clouds a bit -- the clouds in the reflection don't perfectly match the ones up top! I erased some around Fenic's reflection to give her more room to breathe. I also softened the clouds' yellows a bit, mixing in blue so they stood out slightly less from the sky. Then I began filling in foreground details -- digging my color sketch out of the garbage to grab the colors for the log behind Xiaolei, which I forgot to add to my palette.
With all the background details in place, I made a few final adjustments. I redid the foam around the shore of the lake to look a little more soft and subdued. I also lightened the cliff face directly behind top-Fenic's skirt so that it would blend together less.
And that's about it for the painting process! But that's not the end of the story. This is a comic, remember? We still have to do...
Lettering! There's not too much to say about my "process" for this. I type the words, I put the words in a place, I draw bubbles around them.
Well, that's a bit of an oversimplification. There's a lot of intricacies to laying out text in a way that flows naturally. Remember, an English-speaking audience is going to read a page from top-left to bottom-right. This has a lot of implications on how any given panel has to be composed. For this page, I had a lot more breathing room than usual, since it's a full-page spread -- in fact, trying to fit the dialogue I needed in here is what convinced me to spread this panel out in the first place. Still, though -- I lament a little that I had to cover up some of the mountain with speech bubbles. There's other places those could have gone, but I try to always prioritize legibility over getting absolutely everything I want out of a page. I always try to place speech bubbles in negative space, so placing one over the sand or cliffs was a no-no.
Also, I'm very proud of this silly compositional stunt I pulled using the reflections as a kind of extra pseudo-panel for hooking more dialogue into. I felt so clever...
And that's it! Right? Well, it used to be. There's one more thing I've been toying with lately:
Post-processing! This is still very experimental, and the specifics are likely to change as I refine it, but I really like the way this looks. Basically, there's two things going on here:
- A slight paper + pixel noise texture, and
- A sharpen filter, set to "darken" blend mode, so that it makes the edges of color areas sometimes darker, but never lighter.
To my eye the effect reminds me of the slight lack-of-crispness of an SD anime on Blu-Ray, or a watercolor print, or a lot of highly non-specific things like that. The point is that it makes it look a little less "digital" at little cost to the clarity, so I may stick with this for a while (or forever). Note the one thing that does not get any post-processing: The text. Legibility over decoration -- always!!
And that's the version of the page I'll be posting on the site, which means we're all done! I hope you found this interesting to read, and maybe took some ideas or inspiration from it!! Love ya bye xoxo