What is your comic making process?
Ohoho! Yes, good question!!
Whenever I get an ask, I copy and paste the question into a Notepad file I have, and if I feel inspired I write the comic there. It looks something like this:
It's edited a bit because I write the actions of the characters in Norwegian (specifically in my dialect), and I wanted to show this to someone and ask them if it looked good. I ended up rewriting this comic a bit!
I have about a handful of written comics ready to be drawn as we speak, and when I feel ready I boot up my screen tablet and open Krita.
I open a new canvas, 600x400 pixels.
I pick a random colour, usually pink, to sketch the composition of the panels. This is one of the most difficult parts, honestly, because I don't want each panel to be boring, with the characters standing face-to-face and speaking words at each other. It's tempting to do so because it's easy, but you'll see that I turn the "camera" to make the comic seem more dynamic.
My favourite thing to draw is facial expressions, which makes Den so much fun to draw.
I recently started drawing all the panels in the same file. I used to make a new file for every panel, but now I put each panel into a separate layer group, in which I keep the sketch layer (composition), the line layer, the flat colour layer, the shade layer (usually the colour black set to 25% opacity, adjust if the panel is dramatic), the text layer (vector), and the speech bubble layer. I usually name them to keep track (ink, col, sha, txt, and bob).
In order, I do the composition sketches, then I go over them again and sketch the details, then I do the lines (another difficult part), then the colours, then the shading, then the text, and then the bubbles. Oh, and the frame, of course, which I just copy and paste from an old comic.
I make sure everything looks okay, and then I upload the images in response to the ask, making sure I add image descriptions to every panel. The image descriptions include what they're doing and what they're saying, as well as translations if they're saying things in another language.
Then I update the List of Comics page on the blog's main page to let any lurkers know what they might expect for the next comic!
I'm not at my computer right now so I can't take any screenshots of my Krita layers, but I'll see if I can do that later and add some pictures then! I have added the pics of the layers!
