The finished piece. It will certainly do for the first part of an about page. I’ve got more details about this process if you want to read them, but I’ll put them below the art so you can skip the details if you want…

The last real ‘comic’ I drew was probably Midwest Spider-Man. By the time I did that one, I had been doing these strips for almost a year, and I had a process down. That process looked like this:

1. Draw the rough layout in pencil in my sketchbook.
2. Scan the pencil drawing into Photoshop.
3. Take the scanned image and place in Corel Painter.
4. Draw the whole thing in Painter with the Wacom tablet, using layers for the darks and halftones.
5. Lettering was done either with the Wacom tablet or using the webdisaster font I created, depending on how much text there was.

That process was a brutal pain in the ass. It took forever to get a strip done because I could never quite draw my lines the way I wanted with the tablet on the first try. So every single line you see in those strips is probably the 3rd or 50th version of that line I drew. Painful. But still, there was something I liked about it, and I think now that it was zooming in on the line drawings in Painter and coloring in the halftones. Plus I liked the way the final comics came out, so that made it worth it.

But ultimately I knew something had to change, and I started experimenting with doing some other things. In this instance, the process looked like this:

1. Draw the rough layout in pencil in sketchbook.
2. Draw ‘finished’ pencils in sketchbook.
3. Ink on a new sheet of paper using a light table (really a flashlight rigged under my kitchen table) with the pencils underneath.
4. Scan inked drawing into Photoshop.
5. Add letters with Wacom tablet and add shading.

This is the same process I’ve been using for the last few pictures. It’s not really less steps, but those steps are far less painful. The key is that I get to ink with pens instead of the Wacom tablet, and the lettering is still done on the computer where I can undo and move the words around if necessary. I think it comes out looking very organic and with my ‘signature’ style. The biggest time sink is the lettering, but I can see myself getting much faster at it the more I do it. And the only way I’ll get any faster than that is to use a computer font, but I much prefer the hand-lettered look.

I can see using this process over and over, but I’ll probably draw on heavier stock to begin with. I used thin sketch paper and I would have had trouble erasing the pencil lines had I inked on it. Not to mention that I would have ruined the whole thing when I tried unsuccessfully to letter it the other day…