Thank you Blizzard and Diablo 3 for an imperfect launch day. I actually managed to get some work done

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This is gonna be a heavy dialogue page. No complicated backgrounds (yay!). When it comes to these type of pages I often wonder if I should just copy paste the talking heads or redraw a new head for each panel….

Stage 2

Stage 2. It may look like I decided to go with the ol’ cut and paste idea with the talking heads but don’t be fooled. I’m just using the copies as references. The final faces will have alterations to them.

Figure lines. Not final.

Final character inks done. Now to work on backgrounds...

Background lines could be better but feeling lazy today......

Instead of mixing in the Work in Progress stages of the comic with the regular archives I’ll instead post them up in my blog section below.

Stage two. I adjust character positions a bit, and try to get the proportions right in preparation for the next stage. I also try to get the backgrounds in place (the lines don’t have to be perfect yet)

Stage three is where I just focus on the characters and tighten up the lines. I don’t touch the background at all here. The character lines here are still not final (I call this the pencil stage, for reasons of my own). The ink stage is where I lay down the final lines for each figure. That’s where sh*t get’s serious.

Back in the old days when I first started doing webcomics this would be pretty much the second to last stage. The final stage would have just been to add a quick minimalist background and word balloons. The final work was usually pretty crude (by my modern standards) but at least the comic updated at a more frequent schedule. I didn’t start utilizing perspective grids and more refined line work till around 2004, during LoF’s short stint at Graphic Smash. That was when I decided to be a bit more professional with my approach to making comics.

So anyhow, there are still more stages to go before #376 is finished…..

Stage four I continue to just focus on the figures, saving the background for last. It is at this point that I lay what should be the final line work for the characters. To help me focus I remove the background (it’s not permanently deleted. Manga Studio EX, the software I use to digitally draw the comics, allows me to work in layers. The background is a separate layer from the characters and I simply make it invisible during this stage).

Stage five, I finally work on the backgrounds. Depending on the complexity, this can take me 2-3 hours to finish. There have been days it’s taken me longer, and other days where I give up halfway in frustration and leave it for another day because things don’t look right. One of the reasons I save this stage for last is so if I’m lazy and just want to post a strip I’ll find someway of bypassing the background. Word balloons have saved my butt quite a few times (If a strip seems a bit too wordy, it’s probably because I didn’t feel like drawing a part of the background and had to think up useless pieces of dialogue to fill the space).

I usually draw with the figures or word balloons in place so I’m not drawing sections that will later be hidden by the character’s bodies.

After this stage, all that is left are the word balloons and/or sound fx. I won’t post that stage here because it’s basically a finished strip by that point.

There’s actually a color version of this comic page but I’m not too happy with how it turned out.

I’ll probably go back to just doing B&W lineart for the upcoming comics. At the beginning of the year I told myself to have at least 100 new comics up by Christmas. I have some catching up to do….