Sugary Serials :: Comics for All Ages!

Today, the final page of our story “Who is the Crimson Scarab” goes online and to mark this occasion, Kitsy and I have decided to show part of our comics creation process that we used for this particular story. This is the first time that nemu*nemu has been presented utilizing a full page for story-telling and it was quite exciting and challenging for us.

Below you can see an example of the first page in pencil format from Chapter 3 of this story. Kitsy did the original roughs in pencil on an 8.5″ x 11 bond paper just to get a feel for how the page was going to flow. She then scanned those pencils in and then changed those pencil roughs to light-blue lines then printed them out again on 8.5″ x 11″ paper. She then took those blue line print out and started to tighten them up by penciling over them in with a lead pencil. When she was satisfied, she then scanned the finished pencil work in then again converted this scan to blue line via photoshop. At this point she also blew them up to 14″ x 17″ size and printed them out so that I could ink them.

The first example is a blue line pencil drawing.

The next step is inking, thats my job. I usually waited for Kitsy to give me at least 3 pages to work on at a time. The reason I did this was so I could just work on things I felt like doing per page. I usually examined all of the blue-line work first, checking to make sure that everything looked the way it should and there were no glaring story or art errors.

Next, I usually inked all the straight edge stuff like the panel borders. My next move was to do all of Anpan or any of the nemu*nemu cast first. I did this because inking Anpan was a lot different from inking Henshin Rider. I used a Tachikawa maru pen nib and Speedball Super Black India Ink or Dr. Martin’s for most of the nemu cast linework.

Next I’d do Henshin Rider or the Crimson Scarab. Henshin Rider is always a challenging subject to ink! I had to use a lot of French Curves and circle templates to do a lot of that line work. In the past, I’ve used my trusty Rotring Rapidographs for these types of jobs, but I fell in love with Neopiko-Line 2 Pigment Ink pens which are much easier to use. I’d focus on the harder curves first, like Henshin Riders head and yellow sun bands in his helmet, or Crimson Scarabs long swooshy head things, then work my way back to the little details. There are times when I’ll have to fix some proportions or perspective because a panel wasn’t quite working the way i’d like. Kitsy gave me liberties to do this of course.

Lastly, I go in and do any type of background details, like rocks, bushes, trees, benches etc. I didn’t spend as much time doing my usual inking style on these pages because Kitsy had a different coloring style in mind for them. Normally I’d put in a lot more detail into my inking but not for these pages. It was still a lot of work!

Finally the inks are done and the page is handed back over to Kitsy. She then scans the inks into the computer and cleans things up. She drops out the blue line and just keeps the dark black inked lines. Then proceeds to “fix” anything she deems necessary. Then the coloring begins. One day she’ll do a tutorial on how she did all of that fun stuff. But for now, just take a look at the page below.

Lastly, the colored page is sent to my computer and finish it up with lettering. This is all done in Adobe Illustrator. I then send that to a layer in photoshop where the page is completed.

Thanks for sticking with us through the entire story! We hope you liked it as much as we enjoyed being able to create it!

Here’s one more set of pages demonstrating the process for creating another page in this chapter.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 2:32 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.