How I Draw Comics 2

Welcome to another Making of Tilted Sun blog where I go into some of the process behind making this comic!

There are some Tilted Sun spoilers in this blog, which is about the process of making comics digitally in 2019 and 2020! #jewell2020! Please be sure to start reading the comic from page 1 if you haven’t already:

https://www.tiltedsun.com/comic-1/2018/5/5/page-1

All right let’s jump in!

It’s been a while since my last update on how I draw comics.

At this point I am working with panels that I fill in quickly and panels that I fill in slowly. To get ideas on the page as fast as possible (otherwise they slip away) I blueline in placeholders for figures that will eventually be there, even if I can’t fill in the figures right away.

Comic pages for me do not come to life as a slow fade, it’s more a scattershot of areas that resolve and areas that are still-to-be resolved.

While I can’t say this is the absolute objective right way to make comics, it works for me because I allow myself to draw what I am excited about and work from there. It also helps me get ideas down as quickly as possible before they slip away.

The panel layout below is the very first thumbnails for when Cross finds Grey Eyes.

The thumbnails for me are as cruddy as possible, where I am just trying to get the placement right. While I do not write out panels or a script, here is what goes through my head and what I wanted to get into the thumbnails and the page:

Panel 1: all right this is a side to side scene where you can see that Cross is approaching and Grey Eyes is a bit vigilant. She is absolutely not sure how she feels about him.

Panel 2: Grey Eyes has her hand on her chest of patterns, which hasn’t been explained yet.

Panel 3: the same pose for Grey Eyes, but she is clutching her spear (spear was ditched in the final version). It’s a much different place and time.

Panel 4: Environment shot, you can see something in the distance, a wild red cloud. This is the Megafauna. Cross and Grey Eyes are in the foreground. Grey Eyes is sitting down with her spear at rest, Cross is looking mostly into the distance.

Panel 5: Cross looking at camera which is Grey Eyes, telling her to go back

Panel 6: Focus on Grey Eyes, she is determined but it’s not clear yet who she is or why.

Panel 7: The megafauna is clearly getting closer

Panel 8: (Extra panel added after thumbnails) Cross and Grey eyes are looking up, whatever is approaching is very large. Hair, scarves, capes are all flowing in the right direction, there is a lot of wind and movement.

Since a page about Helixers was before this page, I began to introduce how Helixers talk to each other in this page. Helixers are mentally joined, through Interpreters, they share a kind of psychic network together. Morgan is Cross’s Helix Pair, so, Morgan and Cross can send each other messages between themselves and speak silently even while apart, this is a ‘call.’ Morgan speaks or calls in a yellow, Stan-Lee Era comic dialogue box. Morgan is more cheery and optimistic, so I chose yellow to represent his dialogue. Cross is more reserved, so his dialogue box color is pale blue, similar to his eyes. When the Helixers ‘call’ each other, their calls are enclosed in curly brackets, { }.

The upcoming segments of the comic go into a bit more of the ‘why’ behind the existence of Helixers and what they are trying to do, and more about the Dark Megafauna.

Developing the crashed Air City took some time and thought. Earlier in the comic, Sam finds himself on an Air City with Alex, and the purpose and history of Air Cities are explained a bit further in the segments of Cross’s memories as experienced by Sam.

I actually love drawing all of the rocks in pages like these, I just sit on the DC Metro for my commute and draw rocks on my iPad for 40 minutes and try to make each one interesting somehow. Since the Metro can be bumpier it is hard to get work done on character faces or environments, so, drawing rocks is a great tasks for the Metro.

Developing the Dark Megafauna was easy and hard, I wanted it to be an inexplicably huge monster, a bit like the devil in Disney’s Fantasia “Night on Bald Mountain” or the monsters in Shadow of the Colossus.

It has wires coming out of it or strings, and after a while you see why it is glowing.

To get poses right for Grey Eyes I model her more difficult poses myself.

Below is a good example of a page where it got seriously revised, the first two panels completely changed and had to be turned into their own full page, where Grey Eyes removes the spear from the Dark Megafauna.

Here are a couple more process-to-final images

If I have a dialogue-heavy page to do, I usually start making a comics page by⁠
⁠
1. Sketching the thumbnails
2. Placing the word balloons
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Word balloons take up a huge amount of real estate in a panel, so you have to either plan ahead and map out the balloons, or, you have to prepare for HALF of your artwork to get covered by the balloon! ⁠
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I do all of the lettering myself, so if I make a mistake in either the art or lettering, fortunately I only have myself to boss around!
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Catch you around the site, thanks for reading this process blog! ⁠

Making Of Tilted Sun: Becky's Desk

Howdy to all Space Cowboys and welcome back to another Making of Post! In these posts I lay out EVERYTHING that goes into making this comic.

Here’s what I’m up to and what I’m doing and what I’m thinking about.

Ever have something that you know to be true, but then forget it, and relearn it only after hanging out with friends?

To loosen up before working on Tilted Sun I recently took some advice from my friends and have been doing informal warmup drawings of DnD characters:

It’s been fun to work on one-off characters to loosen up and get ideas for new clothing designs. 

Silliness in art is one of the things I loved most about visiting Tokyo!

Culture is better when art allows itself to be a bit silly instead of when art convinces us that it is Too Serious To Be Touched. It’s nice that people want to dress up and eat cheese and wine in order to see art, but what if we could just see the best art in jeans? Tokyo feels a lot like that. The most excellent art you’ve ever seen is absolutely everywhere.

Anyways, silliness in Anime is one of my favorite things - Full Metal Alchemist and Cowboy Bebop are overall pretty serious shows, but there are extremely funny episodes. Laughter adds to reality in many ways, so I am thinking about how to add more of this to Tilted Sun.

In Japan I picked up the Persona 5 Animations Keyframe Book and also this guide to Octopath Traveler. It’s been fun to leaf through both books and look at character treatments, expressions, and clothing ideas. Not a detail is spared and both series are not overwrought either. You know how some anime can be kind of over the top? I sense a lot of brilliance and also order in these. 

I haven’t been able to finish Persona 5 for years, it’s something that happens to me where I just can’t bring myself to finish something that I really like. I did the same thing with Witcher 3. Never finished the game. I just loved it too much and didn’t want it to end.

While visiting Houston I found this old Prince Valiant book from, oh god, 1947, and the illustrations have been nothing short of a front row seat to mastery. The inkwork is so dramatic .

While in Houston I also went to this Van Gogh show, it was amazing. I picked up a copy of The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh and am about halfway through.

He wrote something like 830 letters in his life, all of which were saved by his brother Theo’s wife. It is only thanks to these letters that we know anything about Van Gogh. Overall the letters are almost eerily like what it’s like to be an artist today - a testament to their reality. Like the writings of Marcus Aurelius, van Gogh never intended his letters to be public. They just sing with unperformative reality. The letters also help dispel the myth of the Master of None - Painters can write. Developers can paint. Never listen to anyone who says you can’t do several things well.

Speaking of tech, I’ve been using a new tool called Paperlike after a suggestion from Deadlypeach. It’s been great! Paperlike basically turns your glossy-surface iPad into a surface with more drag and tooth, making it more like paper. Paperlike. Haha. Paperlike Website here and at the bottom of this post.

Clip Studio Paint on the iPad is as dope as it ever was and I’m still playing with the new artificial intelligence coloring feature and working it into the production art for Tilted Sun.

More info about the Clip Studio Paint Artificial intelligence coloring feature here! It’s one of the most popular posts on the Becky Jewell blog.

Here are some screenshots of Tilted Sun pages-in-the-making in Clip Studio Paint:

There’s so much more to Tilted Sun on the way, some of the art would spoil the comic. Like some kind of shy fairy, I throw a bunch of little glimpses into the comic onto Instagram, where the art appears for a few moments then disappears, unless you are very dedicated and rewatch the same story over and over again.

My other favorite thing to do on Instagram is to make fun of how I can’t really draw guns. I just am very bad at it! Here is a practice run of some hands and some pretty bad guns

I’m also ramping up my comics skills on another comic, Crow Magnum, which will have some preview art debuting at the 2019 Denver Pop Culture Con! Hope to see you there, I’ll be at Booth A20 with Laurel McHargue.

That’s all for now my friends - this is my braindump of everything on my mind right now. Thank you for reading and I will catch you very soon!

Related Links and Posts:

Akihabara - Becky’s Trip to Japan

Vincent van Gogh in Houston

Paperlike for the iPad!

Making of: Part 1 Line Art

Hello Awesome Readers! It's time for another post of Tilted Sun Line Art! 

 All of this lineart is made in Clip Studio Paint on the iPad Pro! Before panels are painted and filled with color, I draw with Clip Studio Paint's 'Mapping Pen' . 

Eventually I'd love to get away from black line, but I love the graphic qualities of it for now. With digital art and digital painting, it's as if we live in a future where comics artists can use any kind of ink to make comics (black, yellow, blue) so we should take advantage of it! 

I like to paint in background palettes to whatever I am drawing, just to make sure that the colors I have in mind ultimately look cool. 

I'm also still in the habit of creating all line art first in a separate document and then dropping the art into panels later on. I don't draw inside the panels to begin with, but since you can resize art, it's a lot like working with special effects and modeling rather than shooting a film with set boundaries. It's a lot of arranging and positioning, where I do like to follow what I think would be a good composition and framing in a film. 

You can see I sorta draw the frames in the sketchbook page above - these are just so that I can figure out where the art begins and ends. 

Come back for more line art soon! 

Tilted Sun Concept Art: The Logger Bird, Orsyn, and The Tether Orb

Late concept art for the Logger Bird

THE LOGGER BIRD

The Logger Bird is a creepy-but-kinda-cute little guy who serves The Gray Woman in multiple forms. He keeps track of things and overall watches over The Gray Woman, almost like a drone. Eventually you get the idea that the bird isn't just a bird, it's a computer, and a pretty terrible computer at that. To draw the Logger Bird, I usually use reference photos of sparrows or small land birds - the kinds of birds that nobody would ever notice. 

I played with the idea of the Logger Bird having red wings, but ultimately decided that this was too flashy for what the Logger Bird was meant to do. Eye-searing, depthless pink seemed right for his eyes. Later, I added in the trailing effect of his eyes to show movement and also a kind of blinking - it ended up looking quasi-mystical.

ORSYN

As Sam's somewhat-trusted transportational friend, Orsyn gets a lot of screen time in Tilted Sun Part 1. Of all the characters in Tilted Sun, Orsyn seems to be the most diffucult for me to draw, because, horses are weird little guys! They have all kinds of knees and ankles and their noses are pretty funny. 

At one point I drew Orsyn with a full harness and bit, and decided to scrap the harness as Orsyn is more of a freewheeling wild horse. 

THE TETHER ORB

Part One of Tilted Sun opens with an orb that is pursuing Sam and Orsyn. The orb is tiny, but I wanted to conceptualize it as something very front of mind - it's small and annoying, but to Sam, it takes up a huge amount of mental space. He's heard rumors about Tether Orbs but has never seen one before, and the orb won't stop following him. 

How do you give an orb a personality? Given that it's just an orb for many pages, the orb relies a lot on framing to be communicated - the orb's relationship and placement versus other characters like Orsyn and Sam were the key decision points. It will all make sense later, or not, I promise. 

This page below is an almost-completed concept for the world of Tilted Sun. Saturn is now a ringed sun, and Sam, Orsyn, the Orb, and the Gray Woman live on one of the moons of Saturn. In the foreground of this page, you can see the Tether Orb as a tiny dot. In the final version the orb will likely be much more noticeable. 

THE STORY SO FAR....

Below is a photo of my studio in Houston in 2017 where I was working with some early layouts for part one. This was before Clip Studio Paint was released for the iPad Pro, and the comic was being made entirely in Procreate using panel templates created in Photoshop. 

I liked printing out each page and hanging it up to get an overall feel for how the story would flow. After a while I translated this workflow into Photoshop, where I compiled thumbnails of each page so that I could remember which page went where. Usually, you'd do this in InDesign or in a book format in Clip Studio Paint, but since all I was doing is creating thumbnails, it worked. 

I ended up adding a lot of pages in between the pages that you see depicted, and not every panel conceptualization made it into the final cut. If I didn't like something or if it did not look cool, I scrapped it. Everything changed, however, when Clip Studio Paint was released - processes like filling an area with a flat color of paint became a one click process instead of a handpainted deal. Handpainting sounds romantic until you try it with 60 pages of line art... 

The next Concept-to-Panel feature will cover some of the other characters in Tilted Sun, including The Gray Woman, Sam, and the guards! 

A look ahead - Tilted Sun Concept Art for Part 1 and Part 2

While you're waiting for the next Tilted Sun page to post, hope you enjoy this blog featuring art around upcoming pages, panels, and characters!