comic processes - NO MODERATION (Patreon)

These are the thumbnails for NO MODERATION, a project I just completed with writer Elizabeth Brei. A 40-page comic about two girls on the run, set in a totalitarian Chicago of the near future.

With this job, I really wanted to streamline/nail down my process of how I make big batches of comic pages. All of NO MODERATION was drawn on my iPad Pro with Procreate, and then coloured with Clip Studio; just like GODSLAVE and GIRL HAVEN.

The first thing I tried was this thumbnail (small sketch of how panels are laid out) layout, and I really like it! It was nice to see everything altogether in one space, and to physically see how much I had done vs what I had left to go.

These are the layouts, the rough stage before pencils! They're a little bigger than thumbnails, and I use them to nail down the composition of the characters vs the background, and start thinking about things like expressions or leaving room for dialogue.

What's nice with working all in one program is that I can immediately copy the line art from the page I need, paste it into a file with the full page size, and then move things around from there.

Because the story takes place all over the very real city of Chicago, this project was especially background heavy. That means the city needs to shine just as much, if not moreso than the characters in a lot of these pages. It was a good exercise for me, who has low stamina for repeating detailed backgrounds.

Pencils from pages I liked!

I'm extremely guilty for leaving my pencils too tough and vague, so that when it's time to ink- I have to take time to actually pencil the characters in detail- which makes the inking stage take all that much longer.

That's a habit I really tried to kick with this project, to take my time to properly pencil the characters. There's still areas where I definitely said 'good enough' too early, but I'm getting better!

Inks! Pretty self-explanatory, I think. But for fun, here's one of the pages with the perspective rulers turned on:

The one big thing to note was that this was my first project playing with color holds (selecting certain parts of the line art to color). It's a great way to show depth with backgrounds especially, so while I was drawing I was careful to keep characters, the background and background elements on different layers.

And that's it! This project was great for experimenting with my process, and new techniques that I'm looking forward to building upon in future jobs.