#bird's process

[birdsong-warriors]

Hey Bird, I've been reading your stories for a few months now and I've been meaning to ask, how do you make the backgrounds for your comics? I find them all so beautiful detailed yet you make pages so often, it seems? How do you do it? Do you use brushes to help with it, if so, then which ones? If you do it all yourself, do you have any tips?

This may take some of the magic out of it, but I abuse the heck out of brushes as well as copy/paste. ^^; Any time I can reuse a previous background, I'm gonna do it. But any time the characters aren't the center focus or I'm establishing a new scene and setting, I paint a new one, and I never reuse backgrounds from previous scenes. It's a good half copy/paste and half hand painted.

I have a MASSIVE collection of brushes I've accumulated over the last two years I've been leaning primarily on Clip Studio Paint, and a lot of them are free resources! I highly recommend @tamberella 's brush sets especially, they're AMAZING!!

Other than that, I usually just kinda paint them from background to foreground, usually working in seven basic layers; sky gradient, background trees, slightly-more-midground-but-still-background bushes/trees, midground bushes/trees, ground, and then any extra stuff on the ground (like fallen leaves or patches of grass). More complicated set pieces such as Swift's den have their own layer folder comprising of 3-6 layers on their own. A nice general rule is that the further away from the viewer, the less detail will be seen. So a lot of my further background stuff has lower contrast and is usually more blurred so that the foreground stands out most.

I have a general rule that I'm not allowed to spend more than an hour on each panel's background, with the exception of establishing shots since that involves figuring out the colors for the scene. I can't let myself get too caught up on each panel because readers will spend maybe ten seconds looking at it. After a lot of practice, you'll just keep getting better and better at it! :D

[birdsong-warriors]

If I can ask, Bird, and I'm really sorry if you've said anything about it before, but how do you give such a nice shine to the eyes of your characters? I'm really curious about how you manage to do it!

Never worry about repeating an ask!! :D Here's a bit of a breakdown!

Extra notes:

I pick the gradient colors by hand on the same Normal layer as the flats, but that's just my personal preference. You could use a layer mode like Multiply to get a similar effect!

I always put the dark colors and shading at the top half of the eye, and make sure the shine is within the shading and preferably in the same basic spot on both eyes.

Keep the shading round to help show the curvature of the eyes.

I've gotten in the habit of using the lightest color in the background for the shine, but plain old pure white works well too! I'm currently experimenting with more vibrant colors for the shine, because that always looks super cool. :D

[birdsong-warriors]

A little something to commemorate Warriors’ 18th birthday today! :D

[birdsong-warriors]

Okay, after a solid day’s work, here’s that step-by-step, accompanied by the amount of time it took for each step! :D

DISCLAIMER: This is page 107, which is 83 pages away from where we are here on the blog. It will be a long time before we see this page properly!

DISCLAIMER 2: I know this kind of defeated the point of this exercise, but I don’t usually spend this long on pages! But because it was a single page I had to worry about, I got really caught up on hand painting the backgrounds and doing complex shading. I’m not sure what I’ll do when I actually get to this scene myself because I can’t afford to spend that much time on every page if I want to maintain a 12 pages a week output. (this page is still twenty away from the last page I finished), but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. TLDR: A normal page easily takes half the time as this one page.

STEP ONE: Thumbnail/Rough Sketch/First Pass: Very rough idea just to know who is where, what the angles are, and approximate expressions. TIME TAKEN: like thirty seconds lol I’m not even counting it towards the final time.

STEP TWO: Sketch: Just the final sketch before inks! TIME TAKEN: 30 minutes

STEP THREE: Paneling/Speech Bubbles/Dialogue: I use Clip Studio Paint, which has awesome options for how to make this nice and simple! Also blurred dialogue because spoilers, lol. TIME TAKEN: 5 minutes

STEP FOUR: Inks: I outline the sketches with a trusty pixel brush and fill bucket the character colors. The lineart color is typically a dark warm brown, but I had to eventually make it black for Cinderpelt. :( TIME TAKEN: 25 minutes

STEP 5: Backgrounds: Oh boy. My backgrounds are usually just rough painting, brushes and textures to just get the basic idea down, but I just had to hand paint this one. I always work from the background to foreground, with occasional exceptions. I use the basic “Real Pencil” in CSP for a lot of my backgrounds, as well as a few brushes both acquired through the online store or were already on there. TIME TAKEN: THREE AND A HALF HECKIN HOURS. A normal page would have taken one.

STEP 6: Shading/Adjustments: Like with the backgrounds, I spent a bit more time on this, but it’s all on one Multiply layer. I’ve found that just gets the best look most consistently while also keeping it simple to me. Also added the eye shine! For this scene, I duplicated and blurred the eye shine layer to get a glowy effect! TIME TAKEN: 1 hour, thirty minutes, normally takes 30 minutes.

STEP 7: Markings: And that’s it! I hid the spoiling speech bubble of course, haha. I think when I get to this page “for real”, I’ll make bits of Swift’s lineart black as well as Cinders. TIME TAKEN: 30 minutes

TOTAL TIME: 6 hours, thirty minutes! Give or take a few minutes. A normal page would take 3 hours.

[birdsong-warriors]

I could be wrong about this, but are the colors you use for the speech boxes matched to the characters eye colors? Like for example, Tawnykit's eyes being green and her speech boxes being the same?

Other than that small question, I absolutely adore your comics. Your art style is phenomenal and you do such a good job expressing emotions! Keep up the great work. I'm so excited to continue reading!

Most often, yes! I have a big reference file that includes all colors and speech bubble colors so I don't have any that are too close in color. But that sometimes means I go with pelt color instead of eye color.

Its an absolutely ugly mess, but it works for me, haha. (The black splotch in the first row for RiverClan is my lineart color, lol. I had to put it somewhere I remembered it, and Silverstream doesn't have any lines, so she had a blank space where her speech bubble color would be that was perfect.)

Tawnypelt has my favorite color speech bubble.

[birdsong-warriors]

I think I’m finally getting better at my colors and backgrounds! ;w; Panel from a future page, which I’ve been timing and saving the steps for so I can answer both questions! :D

[birdsong-warriors]

I’d love of you could show us how you do that multiply later shading thing you were talking about! Your shadows always look so good and I’d love to see how you do it (Whenever you have time, of course!)

I'm not sure how to explain it properly, so I grabbed some examples! (Sorry for the crappy image, my laptop was acting up something fierce.) Here's some panels with my shading layer on Multiply versus Normal.

I use my Multiply layer as both a filter to get the characters to fit into the environment better, as well as shading. It's kind of crazy the lighting effects you can get just using one layer! I'm so used to doing things this way that when I tried to add an Overlay layer to some pages the other day, it didn't look right. It's an especially fun trick during night scenes! Just fill the whole layer with a base "filter" color, and add your darker color for the shading on the same layer. I mess with the colors A LOT with every new scene, but it's worth it to have a little less layer clutter. These are all on 100% Opacity as well! ;u;

[birdsong-warriors]

Is there any reason Swiftpaw is out in the open seemingly away from camp rather than the medicine den? Is it a Bluestar related reason?

It's just the way I ended up structuring the camp, haha. I threw this together real fast to try and get across the map I have in my head:

The medicine den is in its own little alcove, a bit separated, and Swift will be stuck here for about half the comic. When Goldenflower visits, she's coming into the medicine den from the main camp. There's a little stream that runs along the edge of the medicine den, bringing fresh water to the injured.

This is my original map from way back in the early Redtail's Choice pages:

The original idea was that there was this hidden side area where the injured and sick could nest (upper left corner), and that the stream sectioned off a part of that area which would serve as a sort of quarantine, the cats believing the running water would keep sickness from spreading. This carried over a bit into Swifthawk's Chance; we'll see later that Swift is staying in the main area of the medicine den so Cinderpelt can keep a very close eye on him, but Lostface is in the side den.

The first chapter of Swifthawk's Chance shows the area as way too open and not set in a ravine at all. I'm not really sure why I made it look that way since I drew the camp correctly in The Path Between, lol, but no going back now!