Issue #1, Page 2 - From Thumbnails to Final Colours

Many people that we speak to are fascinated by the artistic process behind the creation of a comic book.  As we move forward we'd like to shed some light into said process for everyone, using our first issue as an example.

Step 1: The Thumbnails

After reading through the script, artist Andy Belanger interprets the story and roughly sketches out what the panels will look like and what will happen.  This is very rough and mainly focuses on the action and the placement of the characters and any lettering/word bubbles.

Step 2: The Penciling and Inking

Andy will then pencil the panels in detail, focusing on the characters and backgrounds.  For this particular series Andy is placing a great deal of emphasis upon the backgrounds for each panel, as evidenced on this page.  He then goes through the page and inks it - places the shadows, emphasis on the lines, etc.

Step 3: The Colouring

Our colourist Ian Herring now takes over and takes a scanned copy of the penciled and inked page and, using Adobe Photoshop, adds colour to the page.

All in, this is a very labor-intensive process.  As you can see with these results, though, it's well worth it!