October 10th, 2013

Our young heroine has no qualms about trespassing on private property -- does she? Just what does she plan on doing?

As I mentioned before, I used this story as an opportunity to experiment with a bunch of different techniques. I thought I might use this blog as an opportunity to discuss the process I used to create each page. Today's topic will be about the drawing phase.

A typical comic page is first penciled then inked. This process was optimized for earlier production processes that did not have the advantages of the technology that we do today. Inking a penciled page more or less became standard because originally there were no good alternatives. I've personally never been a fan of the inking process (admittedly this is, in part because I am a bit of a clumsy inker). However, I find it very exciting that modern technology has opened up new ways to create comics, even with some very traditional materials.

For this story, I used graphite pencils, black and gray colored pencils, and occasionally one of my inking pens for getting deep, rich blacks. I love the texture of pencil lines and my pages feel naked to me without shading. These are similar materials that I used for Wave Tyrant, except here, I tried to push the textures farther. I really like being able to have different line values - deep blacks from the ink pens and black colored pencils and grayer tones from the graphite pencils.

Here's today's page prior to being being colored.