*Special* The Making of Covenant

Welcome all to a very special post I've been preparing for the sake of my blog visitors. Out of all of those who have taken a look at the first chapter of my Graphic Novel/Manga project, Covenant, many have asked me how exactly I went about doing it. Since I follow a step-by-step procedure, I figured it would work well to show pictures of one page as it goes through each of these stages, so you all can get the feel of what it is I do!
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If that doesn't sound special enough to you, the page I have chosen happens to be from the yet-to-be released Chapter Two - Sealed Fate. In fact, it was specifically chosen to serve as a preview of sorts for the upcoming chapter. So, enjoy! And if any of you have not yet looked at Chapter One - Darker than Shadow, it's still here: http://covenantmanga.blogspot.com/. It shouldn't take very long to read; please take a peek :) And if the inconvienient formatting bothers you, I promise I am still looking for an easier way for people to read it.
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So without further ado, let's begin.
The Making of Covenant
Step 1: Thinking up the Story
I can't very easily show you a picture that goes along with this first step, because it is all in my mind. This is the only step that I can do anytime, anywhere - and I do! Any time that I'm doing something that requires very minimal concentration, my mind drifts off to Covenant-land and either tweaks certain scenes I already have planned, or comes up with ideas for new ones. At the moment, I have about seven chapters almost completely planned, out of the twelve total that comprise this giant project I've decided to tackle. But anything not yet drawn out is still prone to change, which is one reason making a graphic novel is better than just working on a written novel as I so often do - I get plenty of time to tweak the scenes and twist the plot until it is ideal.
Step 2: Writing the "Screenplay"
During this step, I take the story that is in my mind and turn it into dialogue, typed up on Microsoft Word. Occasionally I add notes of what is happening as well, so all-in-all it turns out to be much like a screenplay.

Step 3: Dividing the Page
This part takes more thought than one would suspect. Once I have the dialogue all written out, I decide how much I want on each page, and then use a ruler and pencil to divide my page into sections ideal sizes for each frame.
Usually, this just consists of boxes, but as you can see on the page below, there is also the outline of a figure - occasionally, this must be done when I decide I have a drawing that I do not want to have in a frame, thus the drawing itself is the frame.

Step 4: Drawing Each Frame
Once sectioned out, I can draw each frame as I've imagined them in the previous step. This I do in pencil, freeing me to make as many mistakes as necessary before I am satisfied with the look. Dialogue bubbles are also drawn in, but remain blank.

Step 5: Inking the Drawings

A pretty self-explanatory step. I go over the pencil drawings with pen - only the lines I want to keep, of course.

Step 6 - Erase the Pencil & Add Bold Lines

Step 7 - Scan Onto My Computer
Also pretty self-explainatory. Adding bold lines is something I only recently started to experiment with. I really like their effect, and often use them to create emphasis or mood to a few frames. I try not to overdo it, however. As you can see, I have only used them on one drawing on this page.

Step 8 - Clean-up

Now we are in Photoshop. I admit this is the step I least enjoy. But it must be done, because there will always be remaining pencil lines and eraser dust on my newly scanned drawings that must be done away with before I can move on to the more interesting steps.

Step 9 - Add Flood-fill and Gradients

Now that our picture is all clean, we can add grey to the black-and-white lines. This takes lots of decision-making: I want the layout to be as visually pleasing as possible, and of course, something that portrays the story as I wish it to be told. I may not be the best at it, but this step is what really brings my characters and story to life. Usually I use flood-fill on the characters and gradients on the backgrounds.

I really like how the bold lines work well with the flood-fill greys. :)

On this page, I have also pasted in a scene from Chapter One on the bottom square to serve as a flashback!

Step 10 (Final Step) - Imputing Text

Only one thing left to do! And that, of course, is finally putting the text into those dialogue bubbles. Even this takes a bit of planning, though - I don't want the text to ruin the artistic layout of the page, so special tweaking is applied to each block of text until it fits in with the intended frame as seamlessly as possible.

And here you have it - the finished page! I'll leave it up to you to wonder what is going on here... but hopefully you have not forgotten Celia Cottonmeadow from the beginning of Chapter One. Apparently she has a big of a larger part to play in this one...

You'll be finding out the rest next August. :)