Putting together a page of Sunshine Bay

Here's a little summery of how I put together pages for Sunshine Bay.  I experimented with a few different ways of getting the same effect, but for this page I did it in layers on Photoshop, meaning that I can pull it apart and show you how it's done.

First up, the sketch.  My sketches are generally a lot more rough than this, but I originally used it as part of a pitch to children's comic The Phoenix (the page is A4 here to fit their dimensions)

The Phoenix showed some initial interest but in the end it didn't come together so I decided to self publish.  I liked the idea of making the book look like a postcard to I cut the pages in half to make them landscape format.  This meant quite a bit of tweaking to get the page turn right but I'm really glad I did, I think it made it in to a nice little object.

I've lined this in Pentel Brush Pen and dip pen:

I then colour some of the lines on Photoshop (for any cartoonists who don't know how to do this: change to document to greyscale, use the channels window to select all the grey, select > inverse, make a new layer, add a mask using the circle in a square icon at the bottom of the layers panel and fill in the layer with any colour you want your lines to be)

I then used the lines as a guide for a watercolour paining:

And finally I put it all together!

It's a bit of a roundabout process and sometimes I found it much quicker to just do it all on paper and scan it at the end.  The main advantage is that you can have coloured lines, and indeed much more control over the lines generally.  I hope that's of some help to someone, and (brazen plug approaching) please do go and buy Sunshine Bay from any branch of Traveling Man, or from my website.