So Dave Shabet took screenshots of his most recent page while he worked on it and … oh goodness, look at this thing. That’s a screenshot an hour at some points. I am constantly impressed by his pages. Dang, son.

I’ll do a tutorial/guide eventually, but basically my tones are always unique and generated on the spot. Basically, making sure I’m working in Grayscale (or the next few steps will go wonky) in photoshop I tone/shade with flat grays on multiple layers and then add textures where I see fit, and then on each layer(or selected area, depending) I apply the Color Halftone filter, alternating between the angles of the “default” setting, or setting all angles to 45 degrees — these are my go-to angles and any others tend to throw things off. I just play around and change “size” and angle depending on preferences, and sometimes I’ll repeatedly “undo” a halftone filter because it didn’t look right, and keep trying different settings over and over until the tones look how I wanted them to. I’ve sometimes made textures by applying a grain or texture to flat grays, then going into brightness and contrast and upping contrast all the way up, and then tweaking brightness until I see just the right mix/concentration of dots/texture. This results in there being no obvious grays in my textures/tones.

Hope this is helpful :O I was a teachers assistant and a volunteer instructor at different points, but I’m a hands-on kinda teacher so I hope all these words make sense:

• Make committed lines — don’t just follow your pencil lines. You should know what kind of line you want to put down before you put your brush to paper.
• Manipulate your lines. Brushes are lovely and fluid, but you have to learn how to manipulate them to do what you want. Hold them straight vertically to get thin lines, lay the brush on its side to get the fattest lines. You are in complete control of the brush, and you can make it do whatever you want.
• Always have your eyes looking ahead of the line you’re inking to where you want it to go. Guide your hand with your eyes, you don’t need to watch your own hand — that will make you shortsighted and unable to anticipate curves or areas where you need to change the line widths/speed.
• Do not rely on your wrist’s dexterity. Small movements in your fingers and wrists are needed for details and smaller lines, but the longer/thicker and/or more “sweeping” your lines, the more you need to learn to use your entire drawing arm to move to control the line. A painter paints with their whole body — inking with any kind of brush puts you somewhere between a penciller and a painter. Also, leave plenty of room for your drawing arm to move freely and comfortably.
• With that in mind, slanted drawing surfaces become that much more important in allowing your drawing/illustration to be treated like a canvas and allow your hand/arm/chest mobility.

Next time I sit down and draw a comic, I’ll get detailed scans along the way. I got some crappy phone cam pics for an admittedly sloppy page, so until then here’s me copy and pasting that:

Since people have expressed interest and asked questions before, I figured I’d take photos/screenshots of a panel of page 97 as I worked on it. For funsies. Sorry for the phone quality!

First, really quick rough pencils.
Panel’s been quartered off for, I dunno, balance. Made sense at the time. I tend to draw lines connecting characters’ eyes because it really bugs me when eyes don’t meet.

Then, I erase everything til you can barely see the sketches.

Basic shapes.

Rough details.

Camera wouldn’t focus, the marker was too light.
Anyway, then I go over the pencil details I like with a copic marker ( bg10) and erase the rest. Any pencil lines under the copic marker become permanent, it is also what I draw panel borders with. Stole that idea from Kel McDonald.

Then I draw over that the final pencil details.

Then, inks. (they scanned kinda dark, bleh)

(click for big version)
And then, initial editing. More edits were done after this (as you can see on the resective page).

Same stuff with a different panel, except I went straight from rough sketch to marker to details:

There’s more to it than that but if y’all liked this I’ll cover the line editing and tones :U unless that bores ya