Churning out an update on my short comic, Red Wolf Night. I haven’t been devoting as much time to this beast as I’d like, but I have completed penciling and inking… so that’s something? The pencils were complete in late July and the inks wrapped up earlier this week. My original goal was to do some old school ink washes as shading on this project, but after the ink bleeding issues I experienced on my sample page I opted against that plan. I’m kind of itching to move onto something else so I’m not sure how much time I’ll devote to coloring this project. At this point it’s kind of like an unpainted ZBrush sculpt, the form and idea are all there, color would just be icing on the cake?
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| Inks unfurled! |
Since there are eight pages I’m not going to post them all, so below is a sample of the full “traditional” process (a.k.a. not digital) on a couple pages. I’ve included a link at the bottom of this post to the full eight page pdf. I may have gone over a similar process before, but this is my first (and possibly my only) in which all thumbs, pencils, and inks were done traditionally… so indulge me?
First step is always the thumbnails, these are typically garbage and in fact most of them got thrown away but a few did wind up pretty spot on. Those are the ones we’ll follow down the production line… let’s go!
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| Page 4 thumbnails, done on a scrap piece of computer paper. |
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| Page 5 thumbnails, done on another random piece of scrap paper. |
Next step in this process is pencils on bristol board, I used a matte cutter to cut 14”x17” bristol down to 11”x17”. For some of the panels I used non-photo blue, but most of the blues are just blue colored pencils.
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| Page 4 pencils, a wee bit of inking got on this one before scanning! |
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| Page 5 pencils, ramped up the contrast in Photoshop to make these easier to see. |
After penciling, I took these same bluey pages and inked directly on them with india ink. I used Speedball Super Black ink and most of the organic line work was done with a G-Pen nib. For buildings, panel borders, and inorganic lines I used a set of micron pens which I burned through really fast. The larger blacked in areas were done with various brushes, mostly #1 & #2 round brushes.
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| Page 4 inks over pencils |
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| Page 5 inks over pencils |
And the final step is to take the scanned “inks over pencils” into Photoshop and run thorough the process outlined in this article.
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| Page 4 inks |
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| Page 5 inks |
From here, I took all the inks into Clip Studio Paint (a.k.a. Manga Studio) and dropped in text. Which brings us to the full set of inks in pdf format. Let me know if I funked up any of the text, it was typed in last minute because I didn’t want to letter traditionally… tell no one!