Red Moon Rising page process

Just a wee overview of the stages of my process for making pages for my webcomic, Red Moon Rising. One of my flatmates was particularly intrigued by the rainbow skittle stage (aka, the third image) so I figured other people might be interested to see behind the scenes.

Very roughly: 

1) Thumbnail. Just laying out where everything goes. It's messy, but critical for planning out where things like speech bubbles are going to go. In a text-heavy page like this it's ridiculously important to plan ahead for where it's all going to go.

2) Sketch. Blocking in the major elements and getting a bit more detail in to help with the final lineart.

3) Rainbow vomit. I do a refined lineart pass for each element, separated onto their own layer. I also do the basic flats here just to get the shape down. The colours doesn't matter so much as making sure everything is cleanly separated, hence the vomit colours.

4) First colour pass. I get the basic colours down and make sure everything is reading well. Since the all the major figures and other visual elements are separated in Photoshop, I can easily push the depth by making background elements lighter and foreground elements darker, for instance.

5) Shadow pass. I duplicate the entire canvas onto one layer, add a coloured multiply layer clipped on top of that, and then mask out to reveal the original painting from stage 4 everywhere I want to give the impression of light shining through. It's a quick and dirty way to add a lot of nice colour variation. In this instance I made the shadow layer a deep red, and tinted the underpainting blue to give the impression of the city being the primary light source.

6) Lettering. Getting that dialogue in there. Sure would have been a big damn mess if not for the planning in stage one.

And that's it! Comic magic. Final page is over here.