Just a quick look at what goes into making a page for Open Your Eyes:

First I write out the different scenes in a script. This is basically just to get the movement through the story down and to try to find the voice of the different characters.

Then I thumbnail the page in a rough tiny sketch.

Then I start the actual pencilling of the page. For penciling I use Procreate.

As you can see, I decided between the thumbnail and the pencils to make this a double page spread. I felt like this was the best way to establish the actual scale of the characters in relation to the tower.

Also in the pencil stage I changed the dialogue from the script. It's easier for me to tell what words are actually going to work when I build the page with the artwork than when I'm simply typing.

As you can see the pencils in Procreate are still pretty rough and loose. But at this point I print out the page (or two pages) on 11x17 bristol paper in no-copy blue. I like to keep details as loose as possible so the inking can be loose. If I need to figure out any more fine details, I can do that with pencil on the paper and erase after inking.

The scariest part of inking is putting the first lines on the page.

You can see here I filled in a lot of the blacks with a pencil first just to make sure I felt good about the plan to ink it.

After inking I have the final black and white artwork. I scan that back into Procreate to add the tones and cleanup any final issues.

Then as a final step, I import the artwork into Adobe Illustrator and add the dialogue.

And it's done. Time to start working on the next page.

Ink artifacts

Thu Sep 12 2024