How I Draw Comics 2
/
Welcome to another Making of Tilted Sun blog where I go into some of the process behind making this comic!
There are some Tilted Sun spoilers in this blog, which is about the process of making comics digitally in 2019 and 2020! #jewell2020! Please be sure to start reading the comic from page 1 if you haven’t already:
https://www.tiltedsun.com/comic-1/2018/5/5/page-1
All right let’s jump in!
It’s been a while since my last update on how I draw comics.
At this point I am working with panels that I fill in quickly and panels that I fill in slowly. To get ideas on the page as fast as possible (otherwise they slip away) I blueline in placeholders for figures that will eventually be there, even if I can’t fill in the figures right away.
Comic pages for me do not come to life as a slow fade, it’s more a scattershot of areas that resolve and areas that are still-to-be resolved.
While I can’t say this is the absolute objective right way to make comics, it works for me because I allow myself to draw what I am excited about and work from there. It also helps me get ideas down as quickly as possible before they slip away.
The panel layout below is the very first thumbnails for when Cross finds Grey Eyes.
The thumbnails for me are as cruddy as possible, where I am just trying to get the placement right. While I do not write out panels or a script, here is what goes through my head and what I wanted to get into the thumbnails and the page:
Panel 1: all right this is a side to side scene where you can see that Cross is approaching and Grey Eyes is a bit vigilant. She is absolutely not sure how she feels about him.
Panel 2: Grey Eyes has her hand on her chest of patterns, which hasn’t been explained yet.
Panel 3: the same pose for Grey Eyes, but she is clutching her spear (spear was ditched in the final version). It’s a much different place and time.
Panel 4: Environment shot, you can see something in the distance, a wild red cloud. This is the Megafauna. Cross and Grey Eyes are in the foreground. Grey Eyes is sitting down with her spear at rest, Cross is looking mostly into the distance.
Panel 5: Cross looking at camera which is Grey Eyes, telling her to go back
Panel 6: Focus on Grey Eyes, she is determined but it’s not clear yet who she is or why.
Panel 7: The megafauna is clearly getting closer
Panel 8: (Extra panel added after thumbnails) Cross and Grey eyes are looking up, whatever is approaching is very large. Hair, scarves, capes are all flowing in the right direction, there is a lot of wind and movement.
Since a page about Helixers was before this page, I began to introduce how Helixers talk to each other in this page. Helixers are mentally joined, through Interpreters, they share a kind of psychic network together. Morgan is Cross’s Helix Pair, so, Morgan and Cross can send each other messages between themselves and speak silently even while apart, this is a ‘call.’ Morgan speaks or calls in a yellow, Stan-Lee Era comic dialogue box. Morgan is more cheery and optimistic, so I chose yellow to represent his dialogue. Cross is more reserved, so his dialogue box color is pale blue, similar to his eyes. When the Helixers ‘call’ each other, their calls are enclosed in curly brackets, { }.
The upcoming segments of the comic go into a bit more of the ‘why’ behind the existence of Helixers and what they are trying to do, and more about the Dark Megafauna.
Developing the crashed Air City took some time and thought. Earlier in the comic, Sam finds himself on an Air City with Alex, and the purpose and history of Air Cities are explained a bit further in the segments of Cross’s memories as experienced by Sam.
I actually love drawing all of the rocks in pages like these, I just sit on the DC Metro for my commute and draw rocks on my iPad for 40 minutes and try to make each one interesting somehow. Since the Metro can be bumpier it is hard to get work done on character faces or environments, so, drawing rocks is a great tasks for the Metro.
Developing the Dark Megafauna was easy and hard, I wanted it to be an inexplicably huge monster, a bit like the devil in Disney’s Fantasia “Night on Bald Mountain” or the monsters in Shadow of the Colossus.
It has wires coming out of it or strings, and after a while you see why it is glowing.
To get poses right for Grey Eyes I model her more difficult poses myself.
Below is a good example of a page where it got seriously revised, the first two panels completely changed and had to be turned into their own full page, where Grey Eyes removes the spear from the Dark Megafauna.
Here are a couple more process-to-final images
If I have a dialogue-heavy page to do, I usually start making a comics page by
1. Sketching the thumbnails
2. Placing the word balloons
Word balloons take up a huge amount of real estate in a panel, so you have to either plan ahead and map out the balloons, or, you have to prepare for HALF of your artwork to get covered by the balloon!
I do all of the lettering myself, so if I make a mistake in either the art or lettering, fortunately I only have myself to boss around!
Catch you around the site, thanks for reading this process blog!