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).