Richard and Julie are a young and ordinary couple living in Stokingham, England. Richard’s mother recently passed away and he and Julie now have the distressing task of sorting out her belongings. As they begin the task, Richard is about to find out that his life is not as straightforward and mundane as he might have thought.
The cover is up but the story doesn’t officially start until 15 September. Mark that date in your diaries.
If anyone is like me and interested in what pens and stuff people use, then the next bit is for you. Because I might chop and change techniques I thought it might be interesting to keep a note of the method under each page. They may not change much but you never know.
Tools.
- Raphael 8404 #2 brush. Used on most of the drawing.
- Uni PIN black pigment drawing pen. 08 for borders and 01 on the church
- Higgins Black Magic Ink
- Canson A3 Bristol Board 250 g/m2
- GIMP software. For touching up the scan and resizing to normal print size. I use this a lot as I can’t afford Photoshop and the Gimp is free and does pretty much everything I want. Info on the Gimp is here .
- Manga Studio Debut 4. For lettering and applying the screen tones. Really like using this — and pretty cheap.
- ImageMagick. I use this with a batch file to resize the exported image from Manga Studio to the final 760px wide image for use on the web. The script adds the copyright info as well. The resizing is done via ImageMagick as it produces better results for the large rescaling. You can find out about ImageMagick here.
Process:
- Roughed out on layout paper.
- Put the roughs under the Bristol board and then using a light box produce the final pencils on the back, yes the back, of the Bristol board.
- Flip the Bristol board over and then again on the light box, ink on the front of the board.
- Scan the image.
- Tidy up in the Gimp to remove all the dust marks and scale down to 66.67%. (I draw the original at 150%.)
- Import into Manga Studio Debut to add lettering and apply screen tones.
- Export full size image.
- Run the batch file to use ImageMagick to shrink it for use on the web and apply the labels to the bottom of the image.
- Upload to WordPress via the ComicPress plugin and I’m done.
