Welcome to the second Bonus Week feature. Today you can learn how SCROLL is created from scratchy sketch to finished fragment.
As with any other comic, before I start working on the art, I write down what I want to express in the particular part of the comic. Although I wouldn't call those notes a 'script', they help me out a lot when I'm working out the visual part.
The art of SCROLL starts with a sketch for mulitiple fragments at the same time. Compared to 'traditional' comics, I have to pay very close attention to the interference of the preceding and following fragments, since they are directly connected. As you can see, the sketches of the parts are very small. They serve mostly just to get the panel arrangement right and look like this:
These are the sketches for the first fragments of chapter 2. I'll take the first fragment of that chapter as an example for the rest of today's post. (I usually work on rows of five to seven fragments at a time and go through all of the following steps for all of them before moving to the next one.) The sketch for that part looks like this in close-up:
Starting from these thumbnails I use GIMP to create the lines for the fragment. As you read on Monday, the advantage of using computer and tablet is the ability to change parts of the art easily and without any effect on the rest of the page.
I faced one particular difficulty here with the speech in the last panel, because it is not of the same quality as anything that has been said before in SCROLL. I hope that I managed to find a fitting solution...
The finished lines with the background texture:
After the part of the process that requires the most decisions, I get to the most time-consuming, the coloring. Although, I have predefined images for the sky and the earth, adapting them to the horizon line is very difficult, due to the sketchy line used for it.
The fragment with sky and earth added:
When this is done, I use the Airbrush-tool to color any objects not already covered by the former steps:
This is usually the half-time point for the creation of the comic. The rest of the time, I have to make sure that my computer doesn't crash while it calculates the effects for the borders of the fragment and the panels. Yes, it's an old (or ancient, by today's standards) laptop, but it works for most of the other stuff I need it for.
After this I cut the image up into same-width pieces fit for web and PSP and save them. That's it!
I will not show you the finished fragment just yet. You'll have to wait until Monday (not that there's much that will be different from today's last picture). In the meantime, don't forget to come back on Friday for less time consuming bonus content.
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