Making a Comic Panel

A comic panel step by step

Hello, and welcome to my newsletter! If you are new here, I create comics about adventures in a subterranean planet called Pelkern. I send these newsletters about my creative process every other month.

I always enjoy when comic artists share the stages of their process. So for this newsletter I put together the steps of a panel from my last comic.

For context, here is the previous panel (from Page 17 of Making My Third Comic):

And here is the step by step process for the following panel:

Step 1: Idea.

When creating fiction comics I draw the scene before finishing the dialogue. With this comic I started with the words, however.

*I intended this comic to be a quick, simple project, so I created a background pattern and used it in all the pages. That parchment color pattern is already in place.

Step 2: Sketching.

I already knew what I wanted—a squirrel climbing up a rocky slope, left to right—so I scribbled a couple pose variations in my sketchbook.

Step 3: Penciling.

The first pencil layer is always messy; I’m roughing in the general size and shape of the image.

I then create a new layer and refine the drawing using a darker color.

I keep adding refining layers until I’m happy with the drawing.

Step 4: Inking.

I ink the line-work on a new layer that will show up in the finished page.

Step 5: Flatting.

When coloring a comic digitally, the first step is to break up the image into flat blocks of color. Each color here is on a different layer.

Step 6: Coloring.

The digital brushes I use—vector brushes—have hard edges, but the drawing I create with them can be resized much bigger or smaller without losing any details. (I love this because I draw my comics at print resolution, but the drawings stay crisp when I resize them down to the much smaller web resolution). Since vector brushes have sharp edges, I use a technique called cel shading. This is where you paint in shadows and highlights as hard-edged shapes.

For this panel I changed the colors of the background pattern from cheery parchment colors to a cooler gray. The new colors fit the tone of the action depicted, and they contrast with the bright colors of the previous panel.

And that’s the finished panel. :)

Thank you for reading. See you next time!

—Bethany Sanders