About the Making Manga Web Series
Welcome to the Making Manga web series where we take a look inside my process of making the grydscaen: scout remnant V2 mini manga. This blog series takes a look at my process and also shows you a behind the scenes look at what it is like being a cyberpunk author and indie manga artist.
We will look behind the curtain at the process of creating the artwork and also the inking, book formatting, ebook production, printing and marketing process to help other indie creators see how its done. This is my sixth manga having just come off self-publishing the YA BL contemporary graphic noiz 3: Teacher’s Edition and I wanted to show a little bit about how the grydscaen manga is created. So let’s get started.
In the Studio: Behind the Scenes
Since we are starting a bit late in the process, the pencils are already completed for volume 2 of the manga. This volume includes a unique story that is based on the grydscaen: scout novel storyline and takes ideas from the book. There are two chapters in the book plus a bonus story that was previously only available for purchase at anime convention exclusives where I was vending. So lets take a look at a little bit at the process.
The image was hand drawn with a 0.3 graphic gear pentel mechanical pencil on 100lb paper, I had originally done volume 1 on manga paper then the pages lines are inked using a deleter g-pen with nibs and black ink for the lines.
In this image, I am just going over a line with a gel pen and some of the intial greys are added in the top panels using copic neutral grey N3 markers. Since I do all the manga drawing and shading by hand. Once all the inks and shading are done, the pages are scanned again and and also will add the screen tones by hand using an X-acto knife and tone heya on 100lb paper once all the inks and shading are done and dry then everything is scanned back into the computer and
Figure 1: Correcting g-pen ink lines pre-scan
What’s Next?
Next we will finish the line inking and complete the grey-toning using copic markers on all the pages then will scan pages at 300 dpi into the computer to colour correct in Photoshop.