How I Make A Traditional Art Comic

The first thing that I do when I start making a traditional art comic like The Sadbook Collections is to think of the concept. Usually this happens when I’m trying to fall asleep (unfortunately…) Since this is a comic strip, it’s small and I can easily conceptualize it by thinking about the sketchbook page that I draw in. I’ll turn the joke, or idea, or whatever it is around in my head for a while until I’ve figured out the basic pacing (how many panels will there be? Three? Four? One? What’s the best wording, and what else will influence the pacing — do I need close-ups or insets? A wide shot? How do I set the scene?)

For The Sadbook Collections, this conceptualization process is the hardest part. Once I’ve got that figured out, I open my sketchbook and start drawing… for this, I use a Platinum fountain pen. It’s affordable but still gives you a beautiful, smooth line and is really lovely to use. You can’t post the cap, because of the shape of the body, but that doesn’t bother me too much. (Although some people take a saw and chop off that extra-long end, and are able to post it after that.) I use platinum carbon ink with it (which you can get in a cartridge or a bottle which you can use with a converter).

Then I start drawing. When I’m happy with the comic, I take a picture of it with my phone. Yes, you can use a scanner of course—but you don’t need to if you’re doing black and white comics! It’s easy enough to take a top-down photo and edit it. Using my phone makes it so much quicker and easier for me to make comics, not only because it makes the editing/uploading process faster, but also because if I want to look up references as I’m drawing, it’s a lot nicer to have them on a small screen near my workspace than to have to keep glancing up at something open on a computer.

I up the brightness and contrast on my phone, then email it to myself and make the final edits on my computer. Again, this isn’t really necessary, especially if you had a couple of apps to work with besides the photo app. On my computer, I just use preview (lol). One good phone app (that I’m usually way too lazy to use) is Snapseed; and for the computer you can use photopea (online photoshop) in your browser.

Once it’s on my computer, I change the saturation to 0, copy over my signature, and clean up any little bits & pieces I might have missed. Sometimes I also up the exposure here—if I originally took the picture in bad lighting, it can sometimes help to do this extra step even once it’s already been edited a bit, to get it nice and crisp. And then I upload the pictures! And it’s done!

So that’s how I make a traditional art comic.

—S.B.