Hello, readers!

Today I wanted to show you the process of how I make the comic strips.

Before anything else, I think it would be good to define some important terms.

These little things I draw are comic strips, also referred to as simply “comics”, “strips”, or occasionally (albeit inaccurately) as “cartoons”. They are distinguished from other forms of art chiefly by the fact that they are sequential, meaning that each image (known as a “panel”) builds on the one before it to tell a story. Someone who draws comic strips is called a “cartoonist” (undoubtedly because it sounds better than “comicist” or “stripist”).

The first step in drawing comic strips is the inspiration. This is the insight or idea that, when presented in a certain way, can be funny. I can’t really explain it because ideas will often come completely out of the blue, but I can give you one major tip for being inspired more often: be observant. Keep your eyes open and look around you. Can you see something absurd in your life that you can poke fun at? Do you see something that seems humorous to you, but it has to be presented in a certain light for other people to think also it’s funny? Keep an open mind and be prepared for any random ideas that come your way.

When you get ideas, you often can’t drop what you’re doing to make comics out of them. That’s why it’s good to write them down to save them for later. I like to keep a list of unused ideas, usually one-sentence prompts such as “Jon uses chopsticks” or a punchline, that I can use for when I don’t have any ideas for a strip when I’m due to draw one.

Step two is the penciling process. When you have an idea for a comic, the first thing you should do is write it out using a pencil. Be sure to draw lightly, otherwise you will leave imprints in the paper and you won’t be able to erase them well. Write down all the words (if any) and the rough positions of all the characters and background objects to make sure everything fits and looks the way you want it to. If something doesn’t work, change it until it does. This is good because it is much easier to correct problems at this point than any other.

Step three is the inking. Once everything looks good in pencil, lightly erase the pencil drawings so that they are light but still visible, then use a pen of some kind to trace over the pencil. Wait 1-3 minutes for the ink to dry, then finish erasing the pencil parts. If the ink is dry, the eraser will not smudge it, so you can feel free to erase as hard as you like (provided you don’t tear the paper). If you make a mistake, I would recommend that you sparingly use “Wite-Out” or a generic equivalent to cover it up. Bear in mind, it’s a lot harder to color and ink over “Wite-Out”, and the ink will take a remarkably long time to dry.

Alternatively, if you own a light box, you can tape the pencil drawings onto it, then the paper you actually wish to draw on over that. Then you use your pen to trace over the pencil and no erasing is required.

Step four is the coloring. This process will vary wildly depending on what medium you use (colored pencils, watercolor, digital, etc.), but there are two universal guidelines that you should keep in mind: make sure that you color inside the lines and that the characters are colored consistently. In the first case, it looks really unprofessional if colors go outside the lines. If the color for the door spills over into the rest of the wall or the blue sky goes onto the green grass, that’s not going to win any readers. In the second, you must make the coloring for the characters be consistent from panel to panel. Using the example of Matthew in this strip, it would be very very bad if I had his hat be the right shade of red in the first panel, then a different red in the second panel, an off-pink in the third, and then green in the fourth. It would be nonsensical and, again, unprofessional.

Step five is digitizing. In short, I upload my comic to my computer and prepare it for releasing on this site. This is done by using my printer’s scanner to send the comic to my computer, after which I open it up using an amazing and free image editing program known as “Gimp”. There I crop it into the right shape, correct any glaring errors, and export it as a PNG file suitable for putting on the website.

After that, I simply put the comic in a post and release it into the wild. That part is only necessary if you’re running a webcomic like this one. Here you can see the finished result.

And there you have it! That’s the process of how I make comic strips. There are more things I could have gotten into, like artist’s tools and release schedules, but that is a topic for another post.

Thanks for reading.

–Neal