Process Post: Elephant Town from thumbnails to inks, and printing your art BACKWARDS (Patreon)

Hey, Art Nerds! It's been a couple of weeks since our last figure drawing sesh - Michael's got some family stuff going on - so I figured you might enjoy a little how-to Elephant Town post in the meantime.

I put a cork in the Elephant Town bottle two years ago, so when I started back up last month, I had to do a little digital archaeology to remember the process myself! It's a strange hybrid system that utilizes pencil & paper, a program called Scapple, paper & pencil again, Procreate, Photoshop, a large-format printer, a lightbox, and then paper again.

I can't remember if I've done one of these, so let me know if this is old info. Either way, the "flip trick" is worth revisiting, in case any of you hadn't heard about it yet!

1: Thumbnails

A few years ago, Luke introduced me to this mind-mapping program called Scapple. It's made by the same people who created its popular big brother, Scrivener. I figured I could use it like a digital version of post-it notes on an infinite white erase board, treating each "bubble" like one panel on a comics page, which can be moved around and enlarged or shrunk.

Above you can see a screenshot of my Scapple layout for page 4 on the left, and the translation of that into a thumbnail sketch on the right.

My thumbnails are sketched in pencil on printer paper with the Scapple screenshot printed next to an empty page template, just to make sure the aspect ratio is correct. I typically tweak the script and do little extra drawings in the margins, so my thumbnail pages look a bit like this:

This photo looks like a whole-ass mess, but it's an improvement on step #0, which I didn't mention, which is brainstorming initial ideas all over the backs of envelopes and receipts at the kitchen table. I didn't even include a photo of step #0 in this roundup, because they've all been used to clean up muddy paw prints and spilled tea and they're in the trash now.

Anyway, on to step number...

2: Pencils

Once the thumbnail is done, I place it under my desk light and hover above it with my phone, still as a praying mantis in the breeze, trying to take a photo of it that's so dead-on I won't have to tweak it too much when I bring it into Procreate. I did a pretty decent job with the photo on the left, imo!

In Procreate, I place the photo of the thumbnail into another pre-made template that has page borders and panel gutters and word balloons I've drawn in the past, so I don't have to re-draw them all from scratch. I lay out the text in regular old Times New Roman, just to give myself a leading/kerning guide - I still hand-letter every page of dialogue!

I've been accused of having VERY tight pencils, but it's important to me to make them as final as possible so that the inking process is all about the INKING, not guessing where to put a new line. (Although, as you can tell from the last panel above, my backgrounds are sometimes... lacking.)

And before the inking stage, we...

3: Print the Pencils... backwards (the Flip Trick)

Lucy Knisley taught me this trick years ago and it's been a game-changer ever since, and thus I'd like to pass it on to you.

I bring my finished pencils into Photoshop, and flip them horizontally so that they'll print backwards on the back of my bristol board.

Why backwards? Because I'm gonna flip that baby around and pop it on top of my also-trusty lightbox so I can see the backwards art right-side-up. Like so:

Normally a cartoonist will draw a full page of pencils, using a literal graphite pencil (or a blue pencil, because it's easy to remove in Photoshop), and then ink over the pencils and, once the ink dries, erase said pencils (or leave them if they're blue, as blue pencils don't erase well).

Using the light box to see my backwards art right-side-up on the other side means that there are no blue pencil lines showing, and no graphite pencil lines to erase. I just shut off the light and no longer see through the paper.

I want my original art to look clean and finished so the person who buys it is buying exactly what they see in the final book page, but without the digital colors. Just the inks.

I kinda tucked "INKS" in with the Flip trick, but just to be thorough...

4: Inks

(Obviously don't read those word balloons if you don't want spoilers for Monday's update!)

I use Faber Castell Pitt Pens to ink almost everything these days. An 05 is great for the text and word balloons; 1.5 thick boi for the panel borders; and the sexy Fude Hard for most of the artwork. I'll fill blacks with a Pentel pocket brush and sometimes employ a Sai ThinLINE brush pen for a bit of texture on fine lines. (You can get all of these from my beloved Jet Pens, which is where all of those links will guide you to.)

Once the inks are done, I scan them in, color them using Photoshop on my laptop, connected to my iPad so I can draw on a tablet, and save them in multiple formats before they're shared here for y'all. I'll do a coloring tutorial another day!

This last sketch was in my phone; I'm working on one of the only gender-bent cameo appearances in the whole book (if you're a Shepherdstown townie, you probably know where this is going, and I welcome you to guess). I think I'm sticking with Geraldine for this grumpy, elder punk small business-owner.

Fingers crossed I don't piss off the human she's based on. 😬

Oh, and hey, if you have any questions about my process, have at it! I made this tier specifically for you nerds to ask me "what pen is that" and other such process-related queries, no matter if it's beginner-level. I love talking shop, and I like the challenge of answering 101-level questions (I'm usually teaching the equivalent of a master's class in comics), so never feel like you have to hold back. There are truly no dumb questions, although the more specific the question, the better. :) Have at it!

And let me know what you'd like the next process post to be about! I can do a short-but-deep dive on something specific if you'd like.