My Comic Creating Prosses
In this blog post, I will go into more detail on how I make a comic. Enjoy!
As you can probably tell, my art is heavily inspired by Anime and Japanese art. I work with a pencil, ink, and marker to draw. But I also work in digital mediums. Some artists use mixed mediums to draw comics, like watercolor and collage. Some work with colored pencils and some draw with charcoal. If you can think of it, you can make it. I bet people have drawn comics with cake and clay. Comics can be interactive or more as a movie. Comics, in my eyes, are like scenes in a movie frozen in time. There’s action, dialogue, suspense, death, love, but it’s all told through a still image (mostly). But, as I said, I draw comics with (mostly) pencil, ink, then marker. I have a simple four-step process that I go through when drawing a comic after I do all the meticulous planning. Whether it be on paper or on the computer.
First, I lay out the comic in pencil. I like to add detail to my backgrounds and characters as I draw in this stage, so I don’t have to plan anything in the ink stage. The lines are all right there. In this stage, I usually add a rough outline for speech bubbles. But I didn’t do that for this comic; because I made that outline a while back.
For this page, I wanted to do a little foreshadowing. I focused on certain scenes and characters that felt relevant to the show. I asked questions like: What scenes, from a plot perspective, felt important? what characters played major roles? What items had an impact on the plot? and how could they impact the story in the future?
Since the story is an amnesia plot. I wanted the page to feel like we were seeing a story in flashes, glimpses. But, there were pieces missing from that story. I wanted the reader to wonder what they were seeing. I wanted enough confusion so that the reader can decipher what they were seeing, but not know how they fit. Hopefully, urging the reader to find out.
After I make the outline in pencil, I go over it with ink. I tend to be a bit slower in this stage because I want these lines to be neat. Clear, and easy lines were what I was mostly going for on this page. Dynamic, but not that active yet. At least, not in my eyes.
Ink is basically my cleaning stage. Paving way for my next stage.
Color is where this piece truly comes alive. It’s also the most complicated and time-consuming step. I thought about the themes of the story this page portrays, what elements were relevant to the plot and how color can bolden those topics. Since the memory scenes are shown in gray tones in later episodes, I wanted to stay in the realm of those tones. I also thought about the original source material the story is based on, and how the antagonist is often depicted in purple. Gray and purple became the primary colors I used. Green is also an important color for two of the objects in the show. So, I used bright greens to liven the page a bit, so the darker scenes can have an easy contrast.
I wanted the page to be both alive and dead since both source materials focus on that theme. I wanted to embody an otherworldly feeling, as well as a techy atmosphere only found in computers. I wanted the focal point to be the bright green device as its energy flows outward. The device is keeping the panels alive, in my opinion.
The last step is adding dialogue. I wanted the dialogue to be a bit more of a focus for this comic, especially since this is how people will connect to the story. Adding this dialogue creates an extra layer of mystery that I like in a story. I’ve found that when I write dialogue for comics, I like changing the color or texture of the letters to help differentiate a characters’ speech. It gives each person a personality that can be identified. I don’t always do this, it really depends on how I’m feeling and how I want to tell a story. For this story, in particular, there are two characters talking, with a glitchy speech in between. I wanted to capture the dark undertones of the dialogue, so I made the speech bubbles dark. I combined the purple and green tones that are already in the comic, and placed them on the glitchy speech bubbles, just to pull the comic together. The first voice, I chose red because I already knew who this character was in the story, so do many others who watch the show. Red is their main color. For the second voice, I chose dark blue because of its dark and groggy sound. I coundn’t distinguish who the character is, but I had a few assumptions and combined both ideas. It gives the comic an extra splash of color that makes it a bit more fun to look at (in my opinion).
More comic pages will be out shortly, so stay tuned!
-Bellapinkpen
