How to Get Started Making Comics: Step Breakdown

Written By Stephanie Broder

In my post on Essential Skills for Making Comics, I mentioned that teaching graphic novel courses is one of my favourite things to do. Graphic novels and comics are challenging mediums to tackle because they exist at the intersection of many different skills!

If you want to start making comics, this breakdown of all the steps you need to consider might be a good place to start. This post will give a high-level overview of each step of making comics. Stay tuned to the blog for more detailed posts on different aspects of comic-making in the future!

Planning and Outline

Every comic starts with a story, whether a three-panel gag comic strip like you’d find in a newspaper or a multi-volume epic graphic novel. Creating a thorough plan for your comics ensures you effectively communicate whatever it is you want to communicate: a punchline, a political message, a theme, a story, etc.

Outlines are especially important for longer stories. At the outline stage, you can ensure you have all the important aspects of good storytelling, including motivation, conflict, character arcs, intrigue, and tension.

Check out my blog post on outlines here

Script

Whether creating a comic as a team, with a separate writer and artist or doing all the work yourself, a script ensures that you have a clear plan to follow when you start to put things on the page. This is where you make key decisions, such as panel breakdown, dialogue, and imagery.

Comic scripts also follow certain formatting standards, making them easy to read and turn into art. If you want to see some real-life examples of comic scripts, check out the Comics Experience Script Archive!

Check out my blog post on scripts here!

Concept Art

This is one of my FAVOURITE parts of the comic-making process! In the concept art phase, you get to decide the look of your world. You get to design the characters and their costumes, expressions and gestures. You get to design props and key objects, rooms and worlds, maps and lore.

Make sure to consider other stylistic aspects of your comic in this step! What do panels and word balloons look like? What colour palettes and ink stylization will you choose? Play and experiment until it feels right.

Check out my first blog post about concept art, focusing on characters, here!

Creating character model sheets for your comic can be useful and fun, clarifying aspects of their design

Thumbnails

Thumbnails are when you draw quick, messy, small sketch plans of what each page and panel will look like. Thumbnails can be useful for ensuring you plan out the composition and flow within and across panels and leaving enough room for word balloons or narrative boxes!

Some artists even use a digital program to blow up the final thumbnails and start to sketch right over. This can help keep the balance and looseness of a thumbnail sketch in your finished art.

Pencils

While many comics are now made digitally, it’s still pretty common to call this step “pencils” and the outline step “inks”, whether or not you use pencils or ink!

Pencils are where you create the final art. But, it’s still a phase that starts as a sketch and typically does not remain visible in the final art (either because of erasing, tracing, or removing the layer digitally). Therefore, this is where you will get to make MOST of your drawing decisions.

I often do two layers of pencils - one loose sketch that I rework and move around and get messy with and then a clean layer that makes for easy outlining!

Inks

Inking is the process of outlining your work. I suppose this could be optional, as a lineless style is possible! However, the vast majority of comics do include linework, whether it is solid black (very traditional) or coloured.

Inking is an important stage, as the line work is a huge part of the overall artistic style of a comic. You will find some artists who prefer thick lines and pure black shadows. Others might only use black line work, no colour or greyscale, and have action lines, hatching, or dot patterns to give the illusion of grey tones.

Manga, like Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tekkonkinkreet, usually sticks to black-and-white work, relying on screentones to give a sense of light, shadow, and tonal variation. 

Colour or Greyscale Finishing

The final pass of the comic page is colouring. Just like inking before it, this stage provides a lot of a comic artist’s unique style. You can choose full colours or a limited palette, true colours or abstract. How will you represent shadows and lighting? Will your colours be bold or muted? Will you use greyscale? Or maybe a combination of greyscale and colour, depending on the portion of the story?

The best way to understand all the different ways you can ink and colour a comic is to read a TON of comics! Study the line work and colouring. Lots of artistry happens in these steps.

Lettering

Letting might be the final step, but it should not be an afterthought!

A good typographer will tell you how important this step is. You must choose between hand-lettered or fonts. If you choose hand-lettering, craft and precision are key to making the letters readable and beautiful.

If you choose to go with fonts, the choice of font and size on the page should be legible and blend in with your comic aesthetic. Placement of word balloons, spacing within word balloons, capitalization choices, and so many more little choices have a BIG impact on the communication of your story to the reader. Make sure you give lettering the attention it deserves!

Lynda Barry’s work, such as Making Comics, often relies on hand-lettering. Note how careful and clean her writing is to ensure it is still legible! 

Intrigued? Well you’re in luck! The next couple weeks on the blog will be dedicated to breaking each of these steps down into learning goals, essential skills, and examples.

Stephanie Broder
Previous

Five Steps to a Masterful Outline for Your Comic
Next

Three Reasons You Should Build a Creative Community