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beansprean · 1 year

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Hey bean!!!! I love your art so so much and your comics fill me with joy!! Would you mind sharing what's your process to make them?

Helllooooooo ty!! Of course!! Tbh it’s pretty loosey goosey and procreate isn’t the greatest program for comic building, but I manage lol. I usually start with the dialogue (my favorite thing to write!) which may initially be written blearily in bed at 3am in my notes app or directly onto the canvas. I usually build scenes based on the dialogue, which I’m sure is obvious in hindsight since most of my comics are just long drawn out arguments LOL. From there, I do a very rough sketch/storyboard to get the idea of the page down and how I want the panels to look, expressions, movement, etc. I’ll use a piece from queening the pawn act 2 part 2 as a simple example:

I primarily use the 6b pencil for these two stages. Very rough!! Then I turn the opacity wayyy down and do a cleaner sketch over the top, nailing down more details and expressions. This is also where I will use pose references if needed and warp the lines if I need to make something bigger/smaller (bc I don’t have vector layers and they will get blurry once I resize lol). I also usually add the dialogue text at this stage so I can refer to it without having to open up and squint at the barely-there storyboard layer lol. (More under cut, I am not known for my brevity)

Now I can do the lineart (studio pen!) and draw the panel boxes (by hand like a loser using the monoline calligraphy brush). I do the panels after the lineart so I know exactly how to size them for the characters and what I might be cutting off. I do the background lineart after so I don’t end up drawing more than I need to outside the boxes.

You can see at this point I decided to change Guillermo’s position in the first panel, having his arms down rather than up and removing his glasses - the angle of his left hand ended up being very finicky and I decided I wanted to see his expression (and not worry about his glasses immediately reappearing in the next panel lol). I can now add the background, which I either erase around the characters or use a masking layer on (if I have room for more layers lol) Then I start coloring, primarily using a very plain no-pressure paint brush (custom, for to save my wrist) for base colors and then build on patterns from there, changing layers as needed. I add my cheek color at 50% multiply, pop on the dialogue bubbles, and that’s pretty much it!

Very simple shot-reverse-shot scene, but my process is pretty much the same even for more complex stuff like

I’ll play around a lot with effects and background and lighting if I feel like it or if I feel the scene demands it (like the glasses panel - the Tarantino eyes and the glasses flash add to the dra~ma lol), and one thing I know I need to work on is flow! My instinct is often to expect your eyes to go left to right, down, and left to right again, but it’s really pleasing to have something to follow with your eye -like dialogue boxes. In the above you can see how I warped the panels and the angles of Guillermo’s attack to try to make it more exciting to look at and have a smoother flow. Def better than just two rectangular panels on top of each other, but I could have gone way harder on the angle of impact. Always learning and growing!! I just run out of room so often bc I hate using different canvasses for multiple pages, I feel like I lose the flow if I can’t see them on top of each other lol.

ANYWAY. Long fucking post. If you want to start drawing comics my advice is to Just Do It. The more you do them, the better you’ll get and the more fun you’ll have making them!! I never ever thought I would be the kind of person who does longform fan comics (we love you reapersun), but here I am having a blast lmao. Hope this answers your inquiry even a little bit, I’m afraid I am both long winded and extremely undisciplined!! ❤️❤️

#anonymous #tutorial #sorta #comics #wwdits

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