How I Met Your Coyena Dad! Page 1 Ruffs (Patreon)

Good morning, folks! Here's the first page of How I Met Your Coyena Dad! in pencil form. I've also included the original thumbnail page with my early dialog pass.

As I mentioned earlier, once thumbnails are done I'll drop them into a page template, draw panel borders, and write a first pass of dialog. Here I'm finally fleshing out the details of what the characters are saying, but I'm also checking to make sure there's enough space for the word balloons. If things get tight, I'll either adjust the thumbnails as necessary to make space, or I'll rethink my dialog if I want to go with something shorter.

Once the dialog is in place, I'm ready to start drawing the page. This was a tough one because of all the details and the perspective in the background, but I wanted to make sure I established the restaurant setting. I'll draw the characters and background elements in different colors on different layers, particularly where characters overlap, so I can erase and edit one character without messing up another character that's already been drawn. (There's no real reason, but traditionally I draw my backgrounds in orange, my characters in blue, and then I'll add in purple and pink as necessary.)

Also, now that I've got a better idea how both the physical space of the restaurant and the placement of the word balloons is starting to look, I've added in a couple servers in the background to help fill out the setting a bit.

Finally, I import a flattened version of the pencil page into the page template, replacing the thumbnail page, and draw in the word balloons as one final check before getting ready to ink. I'll add the tails to the word balloons later, as I may still make some adjustments to their size and placement, and it's harder to do that once the tails are added into their vector shapes.

And that's it! I'm not sure how much background info I'll need to provide on future pages, but I'll make a note of anything interesting as it comes up. And as always, if you have questions or thoughts, comment below or bring them up in the Telegram group! Thanks and have a great week! ❤️