My Comic Workflow Journey
Based on all the advice I’d seen in forums and youtube videos, I went 100% digital:
- Write the script in a Google Doc
- Layout the panels in an iPad note-taking app (it was VERY rough)
- Sketch the art in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet
- Ink the art and dialogue in Illustrator
The script writing went well and the panel layouts were pretty fun. New to the Wacom/Photoshop combo, my troubles began when it came to sketching the art. There’s a huge amount of configuration (hotkeys, brushes, templates) that goes into getting Photoshop the way you want. It gets esoteric fast as you delve into arcane forum posts on how to do “simple” things like get multiple undos, etc.
It was a great plan but I wasnt having any fun. I didn’t admit it to myself becaus I was scared of failure. Weeks of hacking away at the drawings turned into months, months turned into years where the cursed project was always at the top of my artistic to-do list. And I felt guilty. I wasn’t good at my craft and my lack of skill at these tools proved it. The longer the comic sat there without getting worked on, the more I told myself I didn’t have what it took to do it.
Comic Design in Indesign
THEN I DID IT ALL IN A COUPLE WEEKS ON AN IPAD
A few weeks ago, 6 years after I began the comic, I bought an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil setup. It’s extremely fun to draw in Procreate ($10) and in just a few days I’d sketched my missing panels. Vectors were overkill so I just inked in Procreate as well. A page that took me a week in Photoshop I was able to complete in just a few hours in Procreate. And it looked way better!
Then finally there were still the dialogue balloons. I found this great little app called Comic Draw ($10) and I was able to use it to do all 18 pages of dialogue in just a few hours (including a few drawing adjustments back in Procreate). Comic Draw actually is set up to do the drawing as well but I prefer Procreate’s brushes.
While I did much of the planning many years ago, I completely redrew every line in the iPad without using my laptop for anything. I was able to recreate months of work in just a few days. I could not have done this when I began because the iPad pro came out under 2 years and Comic Draw only a year ago.