Comic page process for Date Night (NSFW)

I'm busy working on my new comic, Date Night, so I thought I'd show my process from thumbnails to finished page! The page I'm going through is NSFW fyi.

I'm a visual person by nature, so when I start a new comic, I go straight to thumbnails. I thumbnail the entire comic, and THEN write down the script. I usually do 4 thumbnails to a regular page(and draw them in backwards order because I'm left-handed and don't want to smudge them).

I might do a number of different thumbnails before I'm happy with the flow and pacing, then write down all the actions and dialogue before I forget what I had in mind and have to go go back and read my handwriting or try to figure out what I was doing with the doodles. These two pages turned into three when I was transitioning to the next phase.

After I'm fairly happy with the thumbnails and script, I do a rough version about half the size of a regular page. This is to get sketch the major action/faces/stances etc. and make sure all the dialogue fits nicely. Once I've done the entire comic in roughs, I'll move on to pencils!

For most comics pages I pencil on a typical 11x14 sketch pad, using a ruler for all the perspective stuff and an ames lettering guide for all the dialogue, even if I'm going to just type the words in photoshop later. It's very important you make sure your dialogue fits and has enough space! I have very messy pencils, so before I go to the main inking I'll do a 'pre-ink' stage.

I use a ballpoint pen and a pentel brush pen on a piece of paper that's thicker than sketch paper but not as thick as what you'd usually use to ink. I do this because when I'm inking with a lightbox, it's sometimes hard to see the details in the pencil, so I can get all the details roughly here and still afford to mess up, and they'll be sure to come through when I do my actual inks. It takes a little bit more time, but it's better than not having an idea of what you're inking and having to go back and figure it out. Then I move to the inks!

This comic I'm doing a little differently as you'll see soon, but usually I ink by hand using a collection of brush pens, felt tip pens, and microns for detail. I was still figuring out how I wanted to ink this particular comic, so I went ahead and did the inks anyways.

For Date Night, I'm inking it in Photoshop, so I brought in the rough inks(and borders and words from the regular inks) into the photoshop, isolated the inks, then used a Hue/Saturation adjustment to turn them light blue(and now I have a photoshop action to do all that work because photoshop actions are AWESOME).

Now it's time to ink in photoshop! For the dialogue I'm using a regular round brush and for everything else I'm suing some fancy new brushes I got from Grutbrushes(they have a deal for downloading 80 brushes for 10$ and while I'm not going to use every single one of them, I'm using enough that it was worth the purchase). This is a rough brutal story so for this comic I'm going to use some rough brushes!

After I've inked everything, I fill in certain areas with blacks and then shade it with some grays. Sometimes for my comic I just go black and white, sometimes I use color, and sometimes I ink-wash by hand, but for Date Night I'm forcing myself to make it all digital. I think this page came out pretty dang good!

It's a long process and there are some comics I'll skip steps on if they're smaller works or smaller pages or don't require so much detail. I hope this was helpful and you enjoyed the process! What do you think of the comic? Does it look good so far?

If you like my comic or found this helpful, consider giving to my Patreon, or buying something on my Etsy, or even asking for a commission! This will be done soon, I hope you like it!