Only four more days until you get to read my new webcomic! I’m so excited, this is something I’ve been working towards for two years. 

While you’re waiting, I thought it’d be fun for you to see what goes into creating a comic panel. It’s an interesting process. 

I’ll walk you through the first panel of My Ex, Vlad.

Outline

I start by doing a high-level outline of the story. For this panel, the words were:

“Gladdy comes home…”

Page Roughs

My next step is to rough out the panel and figure out the “cinematography” and framing of the shot.

First Pencils

I draw a more refined version.

Second Pencils

Then I try to draw it better.

Mentoring

If I am struggling mightily with a panel, I (sometimes) ask a comics mentor for advice.

Reference Photos

Sometimes I act out the things happening in the story and take a picture to figure out how things would look.

Third Pencils

I draw something I don’t hate.

Inks

This step is more than just tracing the pencils. I vary the line width to create subtle shading and “carve” the lines out of the pencil sketchiness. 

Spot Blacks

Sometimes a panel benefits from having large areas of black, this can create drama or lead the reader’s eye to the important part of the panel.

Flatting

The next step is laying in solid color patches under the inks.

If you remove the inks layer it should not have any gaps between the areas of color. That’s so it prints correctly if you make a print version of the comic.

Rendering

This is where you go through and add highlights and shadows based on where the light sources are in your scene. I use a technique called “cell shading”

Dialogue

Then I add dialog. Although this comes last, I have to have the size and placement of the dialog bubbles in mind starting way back with the roughs stage.

And that’s how I make a comic panel!

Look forward to seeing you on the site on Valentine’s Day!

Syne

P.S. If you have any questions or comments about this process, type a comment below and I’ll get back to you! 😀