Oh man. I had such big plans for this contest! I like to write, and I like to create art, so I knew from the very first announcement for this competition that I would very definitely be entering in some format! I had stories thought up, I had illustrations planned out.
You can read a bit more about what happened in the partner post for this one, and see the final project, by clicking here.
Anyway, after finally settling on a comic strip for my project, it was time to get cracking!
The first step in making a comic is creating a script, which I talk about in my partner post
Up next was thumbnailing. This is similar to storyboarding for movies; I quickly rough out the way I want my page to look and what the character poses are like.
You can see a duck with a hat in the foreground! She's in a fifth panel I decided to cut. I guess that's as close as it gets to a deleted scene!
After thumbnails, I was ready to layout my final page. I used Bristol board to draw on. My trusty ruler helped me get the lines straight. At this point I was still planning on using Panel 5, so it was drawn in. First, pencil layout...
Then, careful inking over the correct lines. I still used the ruler to guide my quill nice and straight.
Now for the fun! Time to sketch in my artwork!
I used a "B" pencil to make my characters so that the graphite would erase easily, but didn’t require lots of pressure to get a easily visible line.
After getting them all drawn, it was time to start inking!
Here's a close-up of inking detail. You can still see the pencil lines I drew to create the art in the first place:
Once the ink is dry, you can erase the pencil.
EXCEPT WHOOPS IT WASN'T QUITE DRY.
I'll fix that little booboo after scanning it in!
I finalized the speech bubbles and then went back in with my drawing pencils to add a bit of shading to my farm animals.
Then it got scanned, and it was time to fix my mistake!
YES I USE MSPAINT FOR MY EDITING SOFTWARE DON'T JUDGE ME OK?
And that's it! Thanks so much for reading about my comic making process, and have a look at the final product in my partner post here.