More Awake comics

A little more behind the curtain production stuff from the comic that was given away at NYCC and available free online here: http://www.areyouawake.tv/ .

I drew all the roughs for this in Photoshop. As much as I like pencil and paper, I find the features in Photoshop allow me to work faster and make radical changes with little effort. I used to draw these in marker or pencil, so another benefit is I can even think in colour at this stage. Since I wasn't coloring it, I limited the use of colour to indicate the various narrative states in the comic: essentially present, flashback and dream.

I wasn't originally supposed to ink this, but that didn't work out. The new need to work faster did allow me to try out some things that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

Since I was inking over the blue-line printouts I realised I could just as easily have some of the elements print out black as well and ink over that. So elements created in Photoshop or Sketchup could be dropped in next to things drawn in blue and modified on the board with various pens or brushes.

Oh yeah, this was originally supposed to be a motion comic, so parts of nearly every page had to be drawn and inked separately then assembled in layers. I'm not a big fan of motion comics, so I'm moderately happy that didn't end up happening, but I would have laid out a few pages differently had this been the plan all along.

I think I could have drawn in black and converted to non-photo blue, but I didn't. No idea why it didn't occur to me at the time.

Here're the inks -- well, most of them for this page.

And the rest of them

The page assembled.

And the page lettered and coloured.

It's a strange experience to see someone else's colours on my work since that never really happens to me anymore. It's difficult for me to judge these objectively since the colours are applied and used so very differently from how I approach them -- or how I saw them in my mind's eye while I drew them. The feedback has been generally positive, so that's cool!

I start playing with digital tones and textures almost immediately after this page, so I might show another page process in a few days.