Hay hay! And welcome to my poor attempts of tutorial-ing.
Not as much as a tutorial than just showing you, how those RtE page come into this world.
Disclaimer: This is the Miru-way. The Miru-way is by no means the ultimate way. I know there are better techniques and ways to make a page look prettier than mine.
But I'm a Miru. Therefore, I use the Miru-way.
Then let's begin, yes?
Step one: nail those thumbs!
I usually begin with scribbling the page's panels and text on a half A4 page (A4 = printer paper size, for you non-Europeans).
Sometimes, I also cross out the scribbles and begin a second (third, fourth…) time, until I'm satisfied by the outcome.
Uh, yes, this is a bit of a bad example, as I didn't follow the thumbs in the end anyway….
Step two: scribble on paper
Step two consists of me making several attempts of getting everything on an A4 page.
I use marker sheets because they don't make markers bleed as much as common printing paper does.
As you can see, I tend to scribble a lot, have a lot of lines everywhere, most of them making no sense whatsoever.
Step three: smear some ink on it
Then I ink my pencils. Thanks to the previously mentioned nonsensical lines, this step results in some errors. I used to swear about them. Nowadays, I just light a candle and sacrifice some fruit to Photoshop. But that's not part of this step, so let's move on.
I use pigment ink (rotring Xonox Graphic), tip 0.3 for regular line work, tip 0.1 for smaller details. Again, this is because this is the only pen I know that won't bleed all over the place with my markers.
After the ink is dry, I erase the pencils.
Step four: put some depth in it
Thus begins the shading.
I use ShinHan Touch Markers. They're alcohol based markers, and a bliss.
For my comics, I use all kind of greys (warm/cold/blue/green), but that's just in order to not confuse myself when shading, as the end product will be set in 'greyscale' anyway.
Continuation of the shading.
Usually, this is the step where I make myself some tea. Also, this step is pretty impossible without music.
Note that I am not able to stay in lines.
Step five: transform your drawing into zeroes and ones
I scan directly into Photoshop (not by choice, my scanner decided that one) with the settings: colour, 300dpi, giving me a big file, which is good to work with.
Step six: annihilation of colours
I set the whole thing into 'greyscale' and fix all those little mistakes done while inking/shading.
Step seven: give them speech
I put in those stupid texts my comic consists of. I try not to smear it all over the drawings and to consider the fact that there will be some speech bubbles there, as well.
Sometimes, I cry because there is just not enough space in a panel and I have to cover stuff I took time drawing.
Sad times.
Spell checking never hurt, either.
I add speech bubbles
I make a new layer and use the marquee-tool to make a circle. Then, with the lasso-tool, I add a little 'tail' to the circle. Then I fill it with white. Then, I give the 'stroke'- property to that one layer (black, 3 pix), and viola.
Oh, and I suck at explaining stuff… yes….
Step nine: make it petite
I resize the file for the web to 72 dpi, making it smaaaal (and readable)
Then I upload it onto the holy server of comicgenesis, for your veiwing plesures.
And that's how a RtE page is done atm.
It might change in the future, who knows. Right now, it's the most practical and fast way for me. A page takes an average of 3 hours. (Though I have to admit that since I began to try to do backgrounds and more details, the A4 size of paper has the tendency of being a bit too small)
Over and out
Miru