What Happens In The Dark | From pencils to finished piece

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Last post I took you through the historical event that inspired What Happens In The Dark. This post I'll take you through the steps it took to create the comic, focusing on a single panel.

Reference Photo

Before I start any comic project, I always try to collect as many reference photos as I can. Most of the times, especially when it comes to finding references for character poses, I end up using a lot of stock images. However, sometimes my references come from other artists.

The photo that inspired the panel you'll see below was from famous caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. His linework is super fluid and expressive and he is most famous for his portraits of celebrities. I believe in one of the documentaries I saw about him in art school, it was said that he inspired the look of the genie from Disney's Aladin.

I not only turned to this piece for the poses but also for mood and atmosphere.

Pencil

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This was a picture I posted of the pencils on Instagram which is why it's cropped as such. I used a filter to make the linework darker but in reality, most of my pencils done for this project were done in a Primsacolor Col-Erase Erasable Colored Pencil. I used a couple of different shades of blue, using lighter colors for a base sketch and a darker blue to tighten up the linework. I would sometimes go over images with a normal lead pencil but that was on rare occasions. I used to work this way for two reasons:

Lighter shades of blue are easy to take out in Photoshop, the program I would use to clean-up & add finishing touches on my pages.
Working with lead pencils was always too messy for me. I always managed to smudge the heck out of my pages and after erasing and re-drawing panels a few times, the page became just a grey mess.

Ink

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Prior to my senior year in college, I had been inking my projects with ink and nib but for this project (which was my final portfolio project), I was in a bit of a crunch for time. So my tools of choice were, drum roll please...gel pens! That's right, these bad boys. When I first set out to ink this project, I originally intended to use brushes to ink it. I had done other projects, such as the History of The Ouija Board Comic Poster, with a brush before but for some reason my linework was very stiff and shaky when I attempted to ink the first page this way. I think this had to do with the pressure of finishing my 22-page project (when everyone else was doing 16) and the additional fear of messing up with an unforgiving tool. So I decided to switch to a less intimidating art supply: the gel pen. And it served me well, also proving that you don't need fancy supplies to create good work.

The gel pen was really great for furniture, buildings, and other background details, subject matter that needed consistent-looking lines. When I wanted greater line-variation or was blocking in large sections of black I used my favorite brush pen, the Pilot Pocket Brush Pen. You can get the look of inking with an actual brush with much greater ease; the ink also dries relatively quick and it doesn't erase away as easily as other brush pens.

Clean Up On Aisle 2

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After I finished inking all the pages by hand I scanned and brought all of the pages into Photoshop. There you can mess around with the adjustment levels and the contrast until you get a crisp, black & white image. This is also the stage I get rid of any inking mishaps, any lint or dust that infiltrated the scanning process, and add in the dialogue. I normally leave dialogue to the last steps, though I always have a general idea of what characters are saying in the various panels. A lot of this has to do with the fact that comics are a visual medium and the picture should be the strongest part of the storytelling; the dialogue serves as a compliment to the artwork. For the most part and with few exceptions, the reader should be able to remove the dialogue away from the panels and still have a general sense of what is going on.

Finishing Touches

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Cue the mood! I originally wanted to use an ink wash to color this comic, as I did with the Ouija Board comic, but as I mentioned before was in a crunch for time and. So I used a combo of Copic and Prismacolor markers. These markers are pretty expensive but will serve you well if you can invest in them. They give a similar look to ink wash/watercolor with the convenience of a Crayola marker. You can see in this final stage the influence of the mood and lighting from the Al Hirshfeld photo.

I'm not going to post the page this panel is from because that particular page shows pretty big spoilers to the story. Instead, here is another page from start to finish (minus the pencils...)!