What tools, techniques and technology do you use?

[jono_thompson]

What tools such as pencil, pen, brush etc. do you use the most to create your comics?
How do you achieve the style you do, through what drawing techniques?
Do you use technology to create your comic - tablet, computer etc. ?

---

For me my use of different tools to create my comics have changed quite a bit. I originally started with the traditional pencil, paper, pen - and would even colour in my comics with coloured pencil. However, now in Moments I draw them completely digital - with a mouse - using vectors in Adobe Illustrator.
Ideally I would love to use a Wacom Cintiq, but that's always been out of my price range. But that would get me back to creating my comics by pen stroke, but digitally. I have a non-screen drawing tablet, but don't use it that much - can't get use to not directly drawing on a surface and not getting immediate visual feedback on that surface.

[katverwho]

Because I have a weird lifestyle and couch surf/house sit for the last two years...I have had to figure out how to have a 'studio' that fits in a suitcase! I used to work with a lot of paint and ink, and that's simply impossible with my lifestyle, so I've gotten down to some really essential tools I don't stray from.
.7 mech pencil (I've had it since I was 13!), pentel brush pen, g-tec gel liner, clear plastic rulers. I draw all of Meat&Bone in a perfect bounch large sketchbook, in order, no redos. Everything is scanned with a VuPoint magic wand scanner (smaller than a collapsible umbrella!), then load it onto my laptop, where I apply colours with photoshop and a wacom (my 10 year old intuos2 finally bit the dust this year, so I've been enjoying a shiny new one).

Phew!

[WakaXO]

I do all my work on my cintiq companion 2, it is by far the best tablet I have ever bought/used.
For programs I used to do my pages completely on Sai, but just recently switched over to Clip Studio. I do the whole process digitally, roughs to finish. As for drawing techniques I don't do anything overly fancy, I try to keep my coloring method simple to improve my speed.

[Shanny8]

When doing traditional art, I mainly use a non-photo blue lead, so I dont have to erase. I ink with 102 & 107 nibs, a #2 kolinsky sable brush(for fill-ins), Koh-i-noor technical pens, and occasionally a C-5 calligraphy nib. I use 2 ply vellum finish bristol. When I dont feel like messing with inks, I'll use Kuretake Millennium micron pens, and a PITT brush pen for fill-ins. If I mess up, I use Bleed White to cover up mistakes- depending on how severe the mistake is.

However, over the past year, I've been working digitally more. I use Clip Studio to do my initial drawing & inking...I use Frenden's inker brushes to achieve the line quality that I have. I then import the art to Photoshop(since I dont like Clip Studio's gradient tool, and I tend to sometimes use gradients a lot in my backgrounds) and color there(using cel shading color style). I have a wider variety of texture & effects brushes in PS, which allows me to work faster. I use a Wacom Intuos tablet- I used to have issues myself looking at the screen and trying to draw but my desire to wanna ink and color using a tablet motivated me to get better. I do my lettering in Illustrator, because I'm used to the nuances and finishes of that program.

[mariusthered]

for my comic i use my good old paper and pen in the first stage to jot down script ideas. then i move on to my word processor to write the season script. ( i write seasons at a time)

then I turn to poser 10 where i have digital versions of all my characters and sets the pictures for each scene are worked out and saved in page order. in effect this replaces the sketching stage for me.

once I have a full seasons pictures, I start laying out the pages using manga studio 5, i work on pages three times bigger than they should be, here i do the layout, speak bubbles , inking and color and shading.
then i move the page to photoshop 7 and resize the page before saving to web .
and done another page of swipe city ready to go in the buffer.

i work with a wacom bamboo at present ,it servers my needs but given the chance i would love an on screen drawing device.

[AnnaLandin]

I draw my thumbnails with pencil on regular printer paper, but the rest of my comics-making process is happens with my ancient Cintiq 21UX in Manga Studio 4EX and Manga Studio 5.

I'd love to do all of it in just Manga Studio 5, but I prefer the panelling and speechbubble-tools of MS4EX, so I divide it up like that. It's not a huge bother!

[niinasalmelin]

I use pencils I have at the moment, watercolor and A3 paper. After that it's scanner and photoshop for adjustments and lettering.

[jennula]

For SPEJS, I usually thumbnail with pen and paper, and do the rest in Clip Studio with my Cintiq 13 =)

Some shorter stories I can do mostly analogue. I did a short 8 pages comic where I did the thumbnails on paper, scanned them in and made a rough sketch in Clip Studio. Then I printed those out and put under a light table where I did a more detailed sketch and finally inked with steel nibs and India ink (and also added some inkwash to). It's nice with variation, but I think I prefer doing comics mostly digitally anyways =)

[okellymx]

I sketch away from home with a mechanical pencil and do all my digital art with Photoshop CC and a Wacom Intuos Pro Medium. I also have Sketchbook Pro 6 & Clip Studio Paint but I hardly use them.

My style requires almost zero thought. It is just natural I just choose what details and features to add nothing complicated.

[arbanims]

Cintiq 13hd, Photoshop, Clip Paint Studio, and adobe lightroom

[J.Z.Castillo]

I use my crappy Galaxy tablet and Sketchbook Pro from Autodesk. I will make the change to a Cintiq Companion and SAI in a couple of months, though. However, I make all my storyboarding on pen or pencil on paper. Then I could either take pics of that or scan them and then trace over them with my tablet or just do the page entirely on my tablet. I don't know, I really don't have a process I strictly go by, I usually do what is easiest at the moment.

[Gaspode12]

I do mine from start to finish using my wacom bamboo tablet and photoshop. I would love to eventually upgrade to a more recent version of Ps and a fancier tablet but what I have serves me for now. I sometimes use vectors to achieve smoother curves. The only part of the strips I do using traditional media is fingerprints (all my characters are based around prints) which I scan in and import to Ps.

[Kalyisbored]

I would love to know how to draw directly on computer but I'm still learning. So I sketch and ink (i use mostly the pigma micron and copic multiliner and/or a pentel) on paper and then I scan the page and I had the color with Sai using a wacom bamboo tablet, had the lettering and that's it!

[ahkwardkat]

I use strathmore comic paper (bristol) for my pages. I use a standard pencil for roughs and then a pentel pocket brush/copic pocket brush, copic microns and white ink for the inking process. Then I scan it in and use Photoshop for color and text. I normally use a Cintiq 13HD, however my 3-in-1 cable broke recently and I'm having to use and IntuosDraw until I get my new cable. ouo When it comes to printing, I use Adobe Indesign to put pages together.

[TheYuriCanon]

I used to primarily use Sai for art Due to problems with my hands I've moved from sketching on paper to just my Wacom Intous 4 tablet. The stabilization features in Sai works wonders for my shaky hands. I would use Photoshop CS2 for text, borders, toning and balloons... but a recent update to Win 7 kind of broke PS so it wasn't working properly. Thanks to the support of my Patreon I was able to get Clip Studio Paint EX, which was recently on sale, and I'm loving it. The vectoring is wonderful, more so the vector eraser. Also, recently been learning to create backgrounds in Google sketch up and the fact that you can import models directly into CSP is wonderful... just need to purchase the full version of Sketch up first it seems... Still I found a work around that works nicely. The way I'm going I thinking I'll be mostly using CSP paint now. I'm so happy these programs allow me to continue doing what I love! I just have to learn how to make a lot of these features work for me and not against me.

[Shanny8]

@ahkwardkat HOW IN THE WORLD does InDesign work? I have a version of it, but it will not allow me open any files. Some weirdo error message keeps popping up- I have yet to seriously look into it, but it's annoying!

[ahkwardkat]

It really depends on what the error message is! You could Pm me a picture and I can see i can help? ouo