I have had a crazy and stressful past week, and wasn’t able to finish Page 6. Instead, I am posting an overview of my comic process, using the 2nd panel of Page 2 as an example. Page 6 will go up next week as usual.

 

For making comics, I start by taking a planning week to draw a chapter’s worth of small thumbnails, in which I design the page layouts and write the dialogue (thumbnails not shown). Then I go into Photoshop and sketch a very basic layout for each page. This is usually very rough, with only circles for heads and swiftly drawn shapes for the bodies and settings (Figure 1).

 

Then, in the following weeks, I work on each page individually. I start by sketching a new layer on top of the light blue layout, trying to nail down character proportions and gestures (Figure 2). After this I do yet another sketch layer (Figure 3), where I draw in the details, such as eyes, hair, and hands. I do one last drawing layer to clean up the lines and details (Figure 4).

Concept art for one of the characters in The Pelkern Cycle. Here is the Phoenix in the midst of flames.

Here is a sketch of a Glider, a type of steed in Pelkern.

The habitable parts of Pelkern are the Kerns. They are bright-lit, but where the Kern ecosystems peter out, you encounter the dark regions called the Tenebris. The oxygen is sparser there, and strange creatures roam in the Tenebris beyond the sight of man. If you wander in, it is easy to get lost and never find a way out.