My Process

Here's my rather rudimentary process of creating a page. It is pretty easy to do if you have photoshop, because remember you can always click help>search in photoshop to find any of its features.

Step 1: Pencil sketch. Pretty self explanatory. I use mechanical pencils so I always have a good fine tip. I illustrate on plain 8.5 x 11 paper rather than double sized bristol board (as is industry standard) due to the nature of how I ink my pages. I will go into that later. Sometimes I do a thumbnail sketch of the panel layouts beforehand. When it comes the putting them on the page, my blank page template has a comic page sized frame. I just simply measure out the panels with a ruler and draw them in.

Step 2: Convert to blue. I open the scanned image in photoshop and convert the color mode to CMYK. You do this by going to Image>Mode. Then in the channels window, I erase everything on the yellow, magenta and black color channels. I don't delete the channels themselves because that screws things up when I convert back to RGB color mode. To ink over this, I have to print it out again, and as I do not have an oversized printer, I have to ink on 8.5 x 11 paper also. That's why I don't bother to do my pencil sketches in double scale, because it would be a nightmare trying to do that level of detail on a smaller scale after the fact.

Step 3: Inking. I use a pretty standard Pilot G-2 gel pen for the most part. It's a kind you can get at any office supply store. For certain details however I do have an super fine point pen, and for the borders, I've started using a thicker one so that they stand out more. Then I just scan it into my computer.

Step 4: Removing the blue. To remove the blue pencil sketch lines from the inked copy, I convert to CMYK again and this time delete the cyan, yellow and magenta channels. It should technically be only cyan, but my printer's not perfect, so some of the other colors are used to produce the blue.

Step 5: Darken the lines. I convert back to RGB mode and go to Image>Adjustments>Exposure and set the gamma correction to 0.01. This gives me an image that is almost entirely pure black and pure white.

Step 6: Coloring. For Century, I only do solid tone colors for the most part. So I just simply use the paint bucket tool in photoshop with the tolerance set to 150, so that there's a little bit of blending along the black lines and they don't look quite so pixelated. It is a bit of a pain because the nature of my inking will result in several single pixels not being colored in, and I'll have to go one by one coloring them in. Any missed lines or gaps, I'll fix with the line or pencil tools. As far as color selection, one big mistake I think I made with Night of the Silhouette was how consistent the colors were. flesh tone outdoors during the day was always the same, or at night, or indoors, or lit by candle or fire light etc. Really it comes across as quite bland. For Journey to the Immortal City, I have a much more chaotic color palette. I try to have things brighter the closer to the panel to add dimension, but really it just goes a long way to make all of the panels stand apart from each other.

Step 7: Lettering. I open the files in Macromedia Flash, because it's the only program I have that does vector graphics. In layman's terms, I can bend lines with my mouse so I can get the bubbles at the right shape and size for the text. Then when that's done, I export the image as a GIF.

Step 8: Final image. I open that file in photoshop once more and fit it to a template I made based on Createspace's printing standards. I export this one as a PDF.

Step 9: Assembly. In the standard picture viewing program on a mac, you can assemble separate pages as a PDF document by opening all the pages, then selecting all but the first one. When they're all selected, you drag and drop them on top of the first page, and voila, they're one document. I have to use a filter that minutely reduces the image quality so that the file size can shrink down below Createspace's maximum, but it's so small the human eye can't tell the difference.

And that there is how I do it. I learned the technique more or less from the appendices in the TPB of Locke & Key: Head Games. Credit where credit is due.