Making of a Coolamity Crew Page

Alright party-people, it's time for you to learn how a page is made, so listen up and listen good.

To begin, Andrew "Sabre-Feet" McCalman carves an ice-sculpture of a functioning PC. Many miles yonder I retreat into my kangaroo's pouch and a call is made.  After discussing drapes for 3 to 4 hours the conversation moves onto Coolamity Crew, and we make a few story-board pages that look like this:

At this point Andrew heads off to work on his biceps-flexing and moustache-curling, whilst I draw up a finalised story-board:

This copy doesn't have to look good, but it should contain the layout of everything that will end up in the final page.  Lots of erasing happens here.

Next I draw the page onto watercolour paper, first in pencil, and then in ink, using dip-pens.

This image is about half-way through the drawing/inking process:

When that's done, all the pencil is erased and I go over the ink lines a second time to make the lines dynamic and clean everything up:

Then the page is painted with watercolour, and finally scanned, which comes out looking like this:

Then gutters are added, speech bubbles are written, colours are made strong and a million little things are fixed digitally until the page is ready to be uploaded.

From beginning to end this process takes about 20 hours of unpaid labour, done not for personal gain, nor even for love, but mainly to see Nigel make a fool of himself.