So, I'm totally going to try to do a few different types of comic submissions for the Loves Comics competition, since I have a deep love for comics, and want to represent the many facets of the medium on t-shirts. My first is a slice of life comic, and I'm going to post the process of each shirt as I work on them, as a bit of a tutorial!

"Everything is Handmade"

1. Roughs. I rough out/write the comic/t-shirt design.


2. Border Layout and type. I used illustrator to rough out the panel layout and type, then revised a bit of the story to make it sound a bit better, and work grammatically.


At this point, I'll usually go on to blocking in the pencils, but I'm super tired, it's 4am, so I'll do that later today!

3. I finished the first half of the pencils, am tired, and going back to sleep.


4. Finished the second half of the pencils, as I couldn't sleep.


5. I use photoshop to convert the pencils to blue line, sometimes the text/panels as well, but this time I was happy with the clean illustrator look for those lines, so just converted those lines... Then printed the page out on a big sheet of bristol board, and use pigma liners, as well as a pentel pocket brush pen to proceed to inking. Which is probably the longest part of the process, but I'll try to post images as I complete inking panels:




Had to take a bit of time to work on freelance, and do a vox africanus editorial for the root, but finally able to get back to inking:




Finally got the time to finish inking the page:












6. Now onto scanning/cleanup!
Once I'm done inking, I scan the image, then clean it up, and use curves in photoshop to make the blacks and whites solid:

Then am left with a nice solid black and white image:

7. I then cut the blacks from the layer they're on in photoshop, then paste them into an alpha channel in channels, then use the select blacks option to select only the black on the channel. Then keeping the selection, I go to layers, and make a new layer, then fill the selection with rich black:

8. I then pick a temporary shirt background color from the threadless sub kit file:

9. I then fill my background layer with the shirt color

10. I then make a layer between the shirt and line layer, and start working on the coloring (thinking this might be a 2 to 3 color shirt):














11.Okay, so I added a mild texture over the white layer, so, now I'm going to put together a mock up, and sub it to the competition!


Submission #1 almost finished!

Rock, I put together a mock up, and now it's subbed!

It's up for voting!