behind-the-scenes: whiskey pencils

4.9: Whiskey - Pencils & Line Art

All right! So how exactly does one go from a Photoshop file filled with nebulous sketches, to sharp inked lines ripe for coloring??? Also–you guys know that I love a good background–what are some tips to consider when inking an environment?

One REALLY quick pointer on how to ink under the cut. And more spoilers about Whiskey.

script & thumbs | pencils | line art | color | post

I was particularly excited to ink these pages because a number of the panels were extremely dense. That is, lots of overlap between the foreground and background layers, so that when the comic finally comes together you get a nice, “full” looking page.

Here are a bunch of Waffles and their hands and a mysterious figure:

I work like this: straight to pencils from thumbnails. A few years back, I used to do under-drawings and construction lines between the thumbnail and pencil stages? And do that no longer. To create pencils, I usually set the thumbnail layer to ~10% opacity and freehand directly over this (with a lot of erasing.) Then I set the completed pencils to about ~10% opacity, and draw the line art.

Just what is Bitty looking at so intently? Intensely? Or at the very least, where is he? Well, small spoilers, 🚨he’s in a basement. I love environments! They had so much character! I wanted this basement to feel like a grungy frat party so with are camera angle pointing up at Bitty, you can see the hanging insulation, tarp, wires, and other hip Samwell party-goers.

QUICK TIP ON INKING: In general, objects in the foreground are drawn with much thicker lineweights than objects in the background. If you apply this to your compositions, you can eek out a lot more depth in a really easy way. Bitty is sitting in his locker, checking his phone, when Hops rushes in like the eager good boy he is. The camera in this panel is right over Bitty’s shoulder, so he’s super close to the foreground: thus thicker lines. Hops zooms into the room with a lineweight that’s half of what I used to draw Bitty.

OKAY STEP BY STEP

a) Here are the extremely rough pencils for the first panel of “Whiskey”:

b) And here’s the completely finished lineart, with the foreground at full opacity and background elements slightly faded. I’m really glad the movement in Whiskey’s floppy hair persisted through the inking process–losing energy is my most common crime in inking.

Floppy Hair Whiskey Is Whiskey At His Most Powerful.

c) Aaaaand I put together a gif of the whole process from thumbnails to final line art:

OKAY NEXT TIME MORE SPOILERS AND COLOR! I’m already pretty far into the process, so here you go, the “flats’ of the panel above.

And my favorite. When Bitty’s eyebrows cut his eyes in half, you know the boy is ready to rend.

Should have some color process next week! And then a complete comic VERY soon after that. I hope you’re hyped!