Saturday, July 16, 2011

Workflow Exploration

After finishing up my thumbnails I came to the realization that I have to figure out a way to produce this thing – some kind of workflow from pencils to colored & lettered pages. After a little research I came to three possible workflows:
1) All By Hand (I very likely won't be doing this)
2) Hand/Digital Hybrid
3) All Digital

My first inclination was to use some flavor of a hand and digital method (and I still might), but I came across this book on Amazon that describes an entirely digital process. I ordered the book, received it yesterday and went through a quick exercise that covers the rough sketch to inked drawing completely in a digital environment. This is my first experiment with some added color. On the plus side, the workflow is super streamlined even though I'm a little clumsy sketching on the Wacom tablet at the moment. On the downside, my Wacom skills need some work and I don't end up with nice pencil sketched pages like I would in a hand drawn process. Also, digital inking is also going to take a bit of experimentation in terms of brush settings, but I think with a little practice I can get my skills to an acceptable standard.

I still plan to try a hybrid flow (hand pencilled to digitally inked and colored) before I decide which way to go for the actual pages of my comic, but overall, I liked the all digital method and may end up employing it. Here's the drawing that I did.



4 comments:

  1. Nice prototype, Mike. And I totally understand the workflow thing. It definitely has to be figured out so all the pages can look consistent and be processed in a methodical fashion. Great time saver.

    I prefer to do the pen or pencils analog and then scan them at high res and make them more pronounced. But that's just my personal preference, I like it to appear a rougher I suppose. But for coloring, I'm all in the digital camp with you. The Wacom is a real time saver!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Do you ink on a copy of your pencils?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I do for the Peck stuff. I'll scale up the pencil drawing to about 120%-150% then ink it over a light table. But for Incompatibles, I use cross hatching with technical pencil and scan the original at 600 dpi grayscale. I adjust Curves in P-shop to polarize the values. Then I flat it out in layers and colorize it. At one point I'll sample it down to 300 dpi for print purposes, but I like the initial higher res to have room editing lines and spaces.

    ReplyDelete