I’m going to make another comic today, and write about the process as I go. This way, you can see the whole Simulated Comic Process. Keep in mind that these posts will have spoilers in them, so you might want to wait for the result to be posted before reading them. The whole process usually takes me about 4-5 hours or so, which means I should have plenty of time to finish before the Mountain Goats concert tonight. Writing up the steps will probably add some time, but we’re probably still within bounds.

OK, so let’s begin:

Step 1: Writing 

An SCP strip begins with a premise. I usually use strip fight themes as a starting point, but I’ve already done that this week week. I’ve got a couple of ideas for strips incubating right now - one about an uncaring machine god, and another about androids selling their souls for candy - but I haven’t thought about them enough yet to actually produce them. Also, I’ve been doing a lot of robot stuff lately, so I should be careful of falling into a rut.

This morning I was reading about the Dyatlov’s pass accident, which got me to thinking about mountain expeditions. As a semi-recent transplant to Vancouver, the idea of living next to mountains is still rather strange to me - the region where I grew up is rather flat and boring. Mountains strike me as mysterious and potentially dangerous places, where mysterious and dangerous things might be hiding. After a bit of brainstorming, I came up with the following outline:

Panel 1: An old man wakes up terrified in a rustic cabin. His family tries to console him as he warns them of some great danger that he encountered years before.

Panel 2: With the old man safely back in bed, the family talks about the hiking expedition that he had been on as a young man. He was the only person to return, but he wouldn’t give details. Pictures of the old man in with 19th century-style mountaineering gear are visible in the background.

Panel 3: In an exterior shot showing a very old-fashioned looking village, the conversation between the family members continues. They talk about how the villagers, frightened by the incident, vowed to never leave  the safety of the valley again. On the distant mountain peaks, strange lights can be seen.

Panel 4: The conversation concludes from off-panel as we zoom in on the strange lights to see a modern ski resort, with trendy-looking skiiers and snowboarders flitting about.

I’m a sloppy writer, in that I don’t bother to work out the dialog before I start drawing. I have a general idea of who’s going to be talking in each panel, and how much I’m going to let them say, but that’s about it. I think this is atypical of most comic-makers, but it works well enough for the short strips that I tend to do. I like having the flexibility to change my story as the art progresses. If I were working on something larger, I’d probably have to be more prepared before putting down boxes.

I’m going to fire up Photoshop and start laying out the artwork. I’ll have enough done to post again in about an hour or two.

I try to keep the strip layout consistent, so I have a couple of templates that I made in boxen and saved as png files. This strip uses my standard 4-panel template - 8×3.5 inches at 600 dpi, with the panels distributed evenly.

The first step in drawing the strip is to make rough “pencil” versions of each panel. At this stage I keep things pretty loose - I’m more concerned with composition than with fine details. This is also where I do my character design - SCP has very few recurring characters, so this usually means making up a whole new cast for each strip. A lot of my people look very similar, but this is due more to artistic limitation than intent. For example. the “old guy” in this strip looks similar to the “old guy” in this previous strip only because I’m not very good at drawing old guys. Or, you can think of it as a sketch comedy show where the same actors play many roles

For the last half-year or so I’ve used a completely digital workflow. I used to do the drawing and inking on paper, but I find this way to be faster, and the results look cleaner.

Here’s the first panel roughed in. I’ll post again when the other three are done.

Here’s the whole thing penciled out:

The next step is to clean up this mess into an actual comic by inking it. I do this by making another layer on top of the pencils, and turning the pencil opacity down. Then, I put in the inks using a simple round non-antialiased brush. Keeping the ink layer pure black and white will make the colouring step much easier.

More to come!

Here’s the strip so far with the inking done. I got a bit distracted and this took me longer than I thought it would. As such, I’m going to have to finish the strip tomorrow. Now you know why SCP has such an erratic schedule