Blackbird 27 - The Making of

The Making of Blackbird 27

Materials:

Mirror for on-the-spot anatomy study

Wacom tablet

Adobe Photoshop 7.0

An editor by the name of Alex

Music (because I need music to do keep me sane)

Script:

I draw a thumbnail for the page, and save it as a JPG.

The thumbnail, along with the script for the page, is emailed to Alex. She looks it over and corrects my grammar, spelling, and makes sure things make sense. Then she either emails it back to me with corrections or tells me via IM.

Drawing:

Using the thumbnail as a basic guide, I draw the panel borders into a page template I made a while ago.

Going panel by panel, I draw in first the foreground, then the background (if there is one).

Now I shade clothing, hair, and skin.

I check over the art to make sure there are no random dots, lines, etc.

Dialogue:

I write the dialogue first, and position it.

On separate layers, I draw in word bubbles, and set the opacity to 75%.

Save it in both PSD and JPG format, and I'm done! (JPG format to upload it, PSD to keep it in case I need to go back and fix something later).

Blackbird 27 is hosted on Keenspace, a free webhosting and site automation service for webcomics.