With the ok of “Jovial” Joey Cruz and “Madman” Matt Shults I present to you, interweb travellers KAYLEE: BEHIND THE PAGE.

KAYLEE, is a comic book which I recently did the inks and greytones on. I’m going to walk you through my work process as I go from Matt’s pencils, to the inked and toned page.

Phase One – The Pencils

Here are Matt’s pencils of the page. Once he uploads them onto our server, I can access them from my home computer.

Phase Two – Tone Guides

After recieving the pencils from Matt, I print them out and then paperclip them to the back of a bristol board. I then use my light box to plot out (using my lead holder)where I will be laying tone into. I tend to only create “tone guides” for a certain object in the panel (usually whatever the focal point is) and then out line the gradiation rather than the actual shapes in the rest of the panel.

Phase Three – Tone, Texture and Ink

Now that the “tone guides” are complete, I unclip the pencils from the board and move both of them to my painting table. Now all I have to do is pop on an episode of Around Comics or Word Balloon and I can begin.

For this part of my process I use black guache, a assortment of  small tipped brushes (the finer ones for detail, and the more bristly ones for texture) and a shitload of water. I tend to go overboard with the black here, but I’ve learned to use this to my advantage. In areas where something becomes too crowded with dark tones I will use a very static bristly tipped brush to tear the surface of the bristol, creating a texture which I’ll tone down later on computer.

Phase Four – Photoshop

Once scanned into the computer, I place the my tone page over Matt’s pencils and then go about erasing any unwanted parts of the two images. I then begin to lay in another layer of black tone in between the pencils and the scanned image using my wacom tablet. I use this layer mostly to black in large areas and add tone to small details like clothing folds or shadows.

As I work on the new tone layer, I also partially erase areas of the scanned page so that it meshes with the other elements of the page better.

Once that’s done, I add large gradients (which I then tone down where needed with the eraser tool) to reflect the overall lighting of the room. When the gradients are finished, I create one last layer on top of all the rest where I paint small amounts of white. While I use white mainly for reflections, I’ve found it to be very useful for subtle highlights throughout the panels (such as subtly drawing attention to a specific area).

Tada! All done! Just as a final note, while I’m on the computer I don’t actually work on one layer at a time, but I decided to organize this as if I did in order to clearly explain each layer’s purpose.