A friend of mine asked for a description of the process of making a page of Love and Capes. I've covered it briefly in a backup section in issue #4, but that was years ago and I love sharing process stuff, so let's do it in depth.
A couple of rules. First, this is going to be a LOOONG post, so I'm going to post it in three pieces: drawing, coloring and lettering. Also, to keep file sizes down, my thumbnails may be kind of small. Click on any of them to see the image bigger.
Roughs
I usually thumbnail each eight page grid. Often, I do it with bath crayons in my shower. I really do get my best ideas in there, and this page (Page seven of the third issue of the IDW run of the book) was no exception. I was having problems breaking this part of the story. I knew I wanted to have Charlotte and Darkblade leaving Paris and heading to his mansion. Along the way, they'd discuss a few things.
The scene played out like this. The first four panels would cover how Paul didn't realize he had a certain painting and mention Darkblade's housekeeper/chief of staff. That would let Charlotte mention how much she missed the lady. The joke's important, but the scene also serves to set up that Charlotte was a frequent visitor to Paul/Darkblade's home. I never covered this on-camera much in previous issues, so it's good to reference it and make it top of mind.
The second sequence is Charlotte asking how Darkblade and Amazonia's relationship is going. It recaps the scene from issue #12 where, fueled by wedding desperation and alcohol, both Charlotte and Amazonia proposition Darkblade. This scene shows that Charlotte is okay with being passed over, but not okay enough to resist giving Darkblade grief about it.
First Pass
A couple pages into the very first issue of Love and Capes, I took a sheet of bristol and ruled it up to set up the eight-panel grid I use on the book. This made surethe aspect ratio is right for every panel. I throw a sheet of tracing paper over the grid and start sketching with a blue Col-Erase pencil.
I work in what I call an "animated" style, where the backgrounds are drawn separately, like painted animation backgrounds, and can be reused or repurposed. Panel one featured a shot of Paris as the Airblade flies by. I drew the ship in the panel box, and worked the background out in the 3" x 17" empty area of the tracing paper.
My pencils at this point are pretty sloppy. You can see that in panel one I changed the orientation of the Airblade to get the right angle
Second Pass
I then take my mechanical pencil (.5 HB pencil lead) and start tightening up on the drawings. I'll do this right over the blue pencils. Before I added blue pencil to my process, this used to be a separate sheet of tracing paper. Using blue pencil has saved me at least a sheet of paper per page.
In this stage, I tighten up the artwork a lot, laying in anatomy and working on expressions.
Wherever possible, I reuse elements when I can. It helps me keep the pace I need to do pencil, ink, letter and color a 24-page comic on a decent schedule. I've decided that I can get by with just a couple drawings of the Airblade's chairs and reuse them.
Also, I've started relying on the scanner for size fixes. I drew Darkblade way too big in panel four, so much that I needed to draw the accompanying Charlotte down by panel eight. A lot of times when I have two character shots, I'll draw them as separate elements and draw them "loose" so there's extra room. That way I can move them around in the color stage so that the sizing is right and I can fit all the dialogue I need.
Final Pencils
Now I go over the pencils one more time on a fresh sheet of tracing paper, taking them to a tight finish that can be inked. Just about everything is here now. You'll see the chairs are four separate pieces.These will allow me to cut, paste and overlay the chairs so they can serve every position I'll need.
My side pencils for the Paris exterior scene aren't here, though. I decided that the previous stage was tight enough, and I know that I'm going to need a separate piece of paper to handle those anyway, Like the chairs, I've drawn the Airblade, the Eifel Tower as three separate images so that I can move and overlay them. It will also help when inking, because I won't need to ink to the edge of an overlapping item, I can ink "through" it. Also, this will make some of the color effects, like making background elements have a colored holding line, rather than the traditional black. I won't have to try to cut part of it out when I do that, I can just select the entire object.
Inks
I tape a sheet of layout/marker paper to the final pencil tracing paper and ink through a lightbox. I ink with a brush, flitting between a Windsor Newton Series Seven and a Rafael, both #2. I use Microns for a lot of the more technical objects. I like the Microns because I can press down on them and get a lot of flex in them.
Also, I've made the arbitrary decision that LNC uses few straight lines. Most objects are inked with a French curve, and I think it makes things look cartoonier and a little more interesting.
You'll also see that Charlotte has no irises in her eyes. The female characters in LNC have larger eyes that support a colored iris, so I do those while I'm coloring. This also lets me adust their eyeline a little easier and "fix" where they're looking when I move elements around.
There's a new background as well. I realized that I hadn't drawn the back wall of the Airblade cockpit. The inside of the ship was seen in issue #3, but I wanted to redesign it a bit. There are a lot of backgrounds I reuse, but I think I've gotten better over the years, so I like to tweak things now and then.
I really like the way Paris came out. The Eiffel Tower was inked first with French curve and Micron, and then the cross structure done with ink. I think it's got a nice feel to it. The background is inked in brush, too. I know I'm going to blur it a little bit, and I think it'll give it an almost impressionistic feel.
I scan everything on my Brother MFC-6490CW, which has a nice 11x17 scanning surface. Then I adjust levels and threshold to get a nice black. I'll fill in areas of black, and on the reverses on Darkblade's cape, I'll select those areas and invert them. So what were normal ink lines become highlights on the black cape.