UXB 33 and some process stuff...

Well what do you know, I got the latest page up just in time...
I'm not going to set a specific day or time for the delivery of each page, I'll be happy just as long as I get it finished and uploaded "sometime" within the week!


I thought I would share some of the stages of getting this thing done.
OK, first is my really rough layout/thumbnail. I usually keep pretty close to the original thumbnail- however a few changes were made on this one. I changed the angle of the carriage in panel 1 and pushed the guys back a little in panel 5 for better readability when the chain comes up into frame in panel 6. I also decided at the last minute to give the "horses" gas-masks ...


I then create an ink layer- lower the opacity of the thumbnail and away I go. It's all pretty organic at this point- resizing when I need to, erasing and redrawing until I'm reasonably happy with the inks. The backgrounds are inked on a separate layer.


Then the speech bubbles are added. The lettering was done by none other than Sean Philips! Yeah, he had some spare time...

...

No not really. I simply used his font, bought and downloaded from the Comic Book Fonts website.
Then it's time to get into the colours. I decided to keep them quite muted and as a final touch faded the backgrounds out a little to give the art a little more depth (another good reason to keep the BG on a separate layer)

And that's it! I'm a terrible fiddler though (no, not a fiddler on a roof or the other type -- you know what I mean!) so I'm sure I'll hate it tomorrow- but for now, at least at this precise moment; I'm quite happy with how it turned out...


Now just to stick it up on the UXBCOMIC website.