Fall on Me

Hello everyone!

I thought I’d show you how I make each Fall on Me comic strip. This whole process takes me about 3-4 hours, depending on the number of panels and the difficulty of the drawings.

1. It all begins with the notes! I keep with me a little notebook where I write down all the funny bits that happen to Alex and me day by day. I always have way more ideas written down than I need at a given time, which is great, because I can just pick and choose which one I feel like doing that day.

2. I then go on and find a corner of my sketchbook to doodle a quick thumbnail of the whole strip, to give myself a rough idea of how many panels I’ll need, what the characters will be doing and how big they’ll be on each panel, the position of the dialog, etc. I draw out the comic strip frame and panels on my final page, and roughly replicate the stick figures I doodled in my thumbnail. I may change things a bit or add a bit more detail if I think it needs it.

3. I flesh out the characters based on the stick figures…as you can see, though, I don’t necessarily keep too closely to the stick figures’ placement and size, even though they remain similar.

4. Inks! I used a variety of ink pens depending on the thickness I need. After inking I erase the blue pencil underneath as much as possible. Usually there’s always some bits of blue left on the paper, though, so I just go ahead and fully get rid of it in Photoshop by playing around with the channels.

Occasionally I’ll still make mistakes with the inks, so I go ahead and use a bit of white-out to correct them. I can easily fix them in Photoshop, but I like having the original drawing fixed up too

5. Final version! I scan the final drawing into Photoshop, and here’s where I get rid of the remaining bits of blue pencil, add all the grays and the lettering in Spanish, etc.

Well, that’s about it. Hope you enjoyed it!