Dev Blog - Comics: Story and Coloring

Hello Everyone and welcome back to another Dev Blog. 

Recently I've been making a lot of Comic pages, 1 pagers, 2 pagers, and Odd Taxi that has 5 pages so far and still has a lot more to come, so I wanted to share with you my recent findings and what I've learned, because I had no experience with these before.

1. The Story

If you just make a short p0rn comic with no story, you can just wing the placement of the panels without much worries. If you need a bit more space or have too much, you can easily adjust it.

But once there is a more coherent plot like in Odd Taxi with several pages, I found it was necessary to write down the content of each panel and make a quick miniaute version of the pages. This saves a lot of time in case I would forget later what I wanted to draw and makes sure the panels are already divided correctly (I had some headache with the comic with Bud Gleeful, because I wanted 2 pages, but didn't know how to put enough content in it).

The amount of details you want to write is really up to you, I usually have a vague image of each panel that I don't forget, so I don't write anything about angle or background details, only what's happening, but I know ppl who write a whole paragraph for each panel about what expression the chars make, what they are wearing, posture, gestures, etc.

This is actually the hardest part for me, if it's solid enough, I can build up on it very quickly. The following steps need less explanation, the images show everything well.

2. The Sketch

Once the "storyboard" is done, I can start sketching. I found that even if it takes a lot of time, it's very well worth it to make the sketches as accurate as possible and not just rough drafts. (you can make drafts too, but the final sketches should be near perfect for your needs).

I also add all speech bubbles and SFXs to see how everything is placed. I try to avoid adding too many SFXs and to place them apart from each other to leave some air in the panels.

At this point I had and still have some uncertainty about what SFXs to use, and I found some online glossaries to help.

https://www.boomboxpost.com/blog/2016/5/7/glossary-of-sound-effects (also click Page 2 and 3)
http://mangastudies.com/sfx
http://thejadednetwork.com/sfx
http://www.comicbookfx.com/fxlist.php

There is no perfect solution and I'm still not sure about the "correct" usage of these, if there is one at all, but you can also check out published comics and graphic novels and see what other ppl use. 

Also, if you use the same word a lot, you can google synonyms to add some variety, so the chars wouldn't just pant, but wheeze, huff, etc. 

Here is a good page as help: https://www.thesaurus.com/

The placement of the bubbles and other text elements may change after the coloring is done for better visibility.

If you struggle with drawing cars and buildings like me, use referenc pictures. There are some free 3D models in Clip Studio too, that you can simply drag on your canvas and rotate them as you please so you can draw over those if needed. For the structure of the taxi I'm using a simple car model too and add the details like lights and the railings myself, based on the actual taxi in the anime.

3. Coloring

At this point it's really just a normal coloring process.
I add the lines first on different layers, I have 1 lineart layer for the characters, 1 for the foreground (objects placed in front of the characters) and at least 1 background lineart layer (I usually use several BG layers, but most only need colors, like the sky or grass)

Add the colors for the characters.

Add colors for the background and foreground and some special overlay colors, like the precum on the pants or the light shading of the penis.

Because this is a night scene, I alter the colors with correction layers. I used to manually alter each color (on Page 1 for instance), but that caused differences between the colors of the panels so I changed my coloring to correction layers and using always the same base colors.

First I added the darkness inside the taxi, simply darkening the page (Notice I didn't add this filter to the 1st, the 4th and 5th panel, because those are outside of the car.)

Then I added a blue filter to the whole page, indicating the night shading. 

After this I added the individual shadows.(You can add shadows first and filters later) The shdows have a simple black filling color at 30% opacity. with the filters together they don't look black any more, but nice night-blueish.

And then I add the ambient lights to each panel, depending on the surroundings. There are street lights above the car, so each panel has a yellow light coming through the windows and to emphasize their effect, I add a darkening to the bottom parts of most panels too.

And Voilà :)

I'm still experimenting a bit with panel placement and shapes around. Adding only vertical and horizontal panels is OK, but I'm sure there is still room for improvement there.

For the finish, here is a preview for Pg3 and 4 for the comic with Bill Green.
If you wanna get spoilers, you can zoom in and read the script, but Pg4's script is not finished yet, only in my head. :P