step by step I thought I'd show my process for making comics on this here imageblog. This is just my way, and it's just a vague process that varies slightly every time, but here it is. It generally goes like this-

writing:

generally, I get one or two visual ideas and string them together and figure out some sort of narrative around them. This is the Smog Emperor story for the 1st issue of secret voice, one of the things I had in my head was that it'd be a story focusing mostly on the Smog Emperor's human host Timmy. This gave me a chance to go back and think of moments from my childhood to use, which you'll see mostly later in the story, but also his relationship with his mom, seen here on the first page (below). Another idea, visually, was that Timmy and his mom live under a bunch of highway overpasses. This is based on a neighborhood that I drive through pretty regularly in my day to day life.

So yeah, I basically just write out my plot longhand, writing as much detail as possible, and I'll edit it from there in the layout stage, taking out or ignoring things I don't really need.

layouts:

This is the most time consuming part of the process, and the hardest, aside from just coming up with the ideas in the first place. I'm actually pretty happy with the way I've been doing my layouts lately though-I have a notebook I made at kinko's that's just filled with blank paper and I've been using it as a layout book exclusively since I started working on this issue. I rule out the pages horozontally, a line down the middle and do two pages of roughs for each nothebook page. The drawings aren't precious, it's just there to show me general structural things.

pencils:

Pencils are pretty easy after doing all the hard work laying things out. I have a template (traced from the BlueLine Pro comic pages!) copied onto 11x17 paper that I do my pencils on. First I go through the whole story and do all the panel borders for ever page, which is kind of theraputic and super easy since I already have most of them locked down with the template for the outside lines. (active image area is 10"x15") Once all my panels are ruled, I can just focus on doing pencils and bust through several pages one after another, without having to stop and start from scratch with each page. This makes me much more productive, and i'd probably like ruling my panel borders much less if I didn't do them all at once. I work out lots of structural issues and proportions and whatnot here in the penciling stage. Because my pencils are on regular old bond paper, i can treat my pencils pretty rough and not worry about erasing too much and ruining the paper for inking-

inks:

because I don't ink on that paper! I ink on tracing vellum, usually Alvin brand. It comes in packs of 11x17 sized sheets and i just tape them right over the pencils and ink them through the vellum. I don't have a lightbox, I just eyeball it and it works fine (but I'd use a lightbox if I had one!). You can't really see it here, but I use whiteout very liberally, both to edit out mistakes and as a textural tool. My originals have whole arms whited out and stuff like that.

There's actually another stage after this, as I do another sheet of inks for the grayscale layer, do final corrections, and letter the pages.. but i don't have that part done for this page yet! but you get the idea.  ¶ 4:25 PM