Chap 5 PT1 - Cover Process! (Patreon)

We start with penciling! The most important part is trying to figure out a nice pose with a good silhouette. 

Then it's onto inks! The comic pages are traditionally inked but all the covers are digitally inked~ Jen does all the inks and she prefers to ink in Clip Studio (Manga Studio). The lines come out a lot smoother, plus Clip Studio has a really nice ellipses tool for all those difficult curves~

(Jen: It's one of my goals to try to ink things a little more messily~ But this came out super clean! Next time! Experiment more!) 

Then we import the file into PS for flats. During this stage we also try to figure out a nice color palette. It's easier for us to manipulate colors in photoshop. For this color palette I was experimenting with saturation vs de-saturation. I was inspired by Dean Cornwell's work where he uses monotone figures against a bright color in the BG.

The last stage is rendering! This is where we put in the details and textures. The armillary globe is shaded traditionally with pencil. We printed out the blue lines and Kate shaded it with a mechanical pencil then we scanned it in and placed it over the flats. 

The new version of CC photoshop offers really nice sets of Kyle's brushes so we tried a few new ones out.

Ta-Da!  All that's left is cropping and setting the levels!