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Ever wonder how a strip is created? Well, lots of coffee and chin scratching are involved, but most of it comes down to fun old drawing and coloring.

If you are more of a video kinda person, you can check out this process video I made a few months back, though there have been some changes since then.

It’s worth nothing that my entire comic process is digital. I draw and ink the strip on a Cintiq 21UX in Manga Studio EX 4 and color the strip in Photoshop CS5. For the sake of clarity, I’m only showing one stage at a time. While drawing the strip, I keep the previous layer slightly visible as reference.

Even though I draw the strips about the previous day, it can take a bit of work to remember events that occurred less than 24 hours before. Once I have that idea I scrawl it out as quickly as possibly. The basic idea is to create placeholders for the characters as well as the dialog. It’s in this first step that I establish the blocking and pacing of the strip.

I draw everything before the inking stage in blue because that’s how I did it before making the transition to digital comics.

However haphazard and vague that initial sketch might seem, it ultimately serves as the foundation for the strip. There’s a lot of energy in those first sketches, and working digitally, it is easy to manipulate them and work closely from them. From there, I draw more precise versions of the character’s anatomy. It’s during this stage that I try and draw hands as close to their final version as possible. Other than that, I exclude clothes, hair, facial features, and even head shape.

Now it’s time to drape and clothe the characters as well as add facial features, hair, and any objects they may be holding. You’ll notice that a background has also appeared in the final panel. I actually drew the background after the first step, but tucked it away until now. As far as drawing backgrounds go, I draw that at different steps depending on the strip. Sometimes they are the first level of detail that I’ll draw and sometime they are the last. This is the final stage of pencilling.

It’s time to move onto inking. Letter and word balloons, each of which are drawn by hand, are the first things I ink.

The second (and final) stage of inking are the characters themselves. I ink with a .55 mm Maru pen with slight pressure sensitivity in Manga Studio.

Now it’s time to leave Manga Studio. I export the image as a 300 dpi layered Photoshop file. I’ve been using Photoshop seriously for over a decade and while I don’t particularly like drawing with the program, I couldn’t imagine coloring with anything else. As far as the actual coloring goes, I do separate the characters, backgrounds, and certain fore-/background objects onto their own layer. This is particularly helpful for changing slight details along the way.

All there’s left to do is upload the comic to my site after I reduce the image size and export a web-sized version.

The entire process takes anywhere from 2-5 hours. I’ve been using this process with some variation since going entirely digital last March, though there are always room for tweaks. The second step was something I only started doing a month or two ago. I look forward to the changes in my process and style, so it’s also interesting for me to make some notes about it here.

This process video from five months back is pretty similar to what I’m doing now, but even so, there have been some changes.

Let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to elaborate upon. I love (love love love) making comics and seeing other cartoonists’ process is always a treat. I hope this was at least mildly informative.