Follower was included as a featured comic on The Duck, one of the mirror sites where the comic updates with “rerun” pages every day! The Duck (formerly DrunkDuck) is a long-running webcomics community where tons of comics you probably know got their start, and where you can find completely new stuff to read. You can read Follower on The Duck, although it’s currently behind the main site. Thanks again to The Duck for featuring our comic! It means a lot to both of us!
Subscribing to Follower on any of these sites helps us reach new audiences and readers by showing the ever-important algorithm that people actually like the comic, especially on Webtoons. You also get the added bonus of notifications when a new page goes live!
It’s Creator Days on Itch.io once again! That means that for today only, we get to keep 100% of the profits from all purchases made in our shop! Itch is giving up their usual fee just for today. Thanks, itch!
Follower is a story that appears on the surface to be all gloom and doom and military dystopia, but at its heart it’s a story about learning to not always accept the world as it’s given, and the importance of trusting yourself, and finding those around you who you can trust just as closely.
Only one more page to go in the chapter! The latest Follower page is up! Visit the main Follower site to catch up, or visit our Discord to chat with other readers!
Now that we’re a few more pages into the newest Follower updates, I think I can show off some of the process that goes into making a page. Folks who support us on Patreon get early looks at much more of this kind of material, so if you like what you see, please chip in a buck or two to help us keep the comics flowing and get rewards like this!
This is what the very beginnings of a page look like. As you can see here, each page starts out with a very rough “pencil” sketch. (I work digitally, so not a true pencil, but who’s counting?)
You’ll note that I’ve added in the dialogue text even though there’s no bubble for it to sit in just yet. That step is up next, but in the meantime it helps me make sure that nothing important will be blocked by the text.
After the pencil sketch is done (and this one is just barely a sketch – it’s just enough to lay out where things need to go) then I’ll go in with an inking brush and make refined outlines.
You might also notice some colored guidelines around the edges of the page. These are removed in the end, but these lines let me know where things will be trimmed off when the comic is eventually printed. I designed Follower from the beginning with the intent of printing books, so I use this template for every new page! I’ll talk about making books in a future post.
Parts of the background are left in as pencil sketches due to the method I’ve been using lately. I like being a little more “painterly” and vague sometimes, especially if the stuff is in the distance or is otherwise not part of the main focus. It lets the primary parts of the image pop out clearly – like Leah and her mom in the top panel.
There are a few steps between this initial ink stage and the completed page, but that’ll be a future Work in Progress post. Or, you can join us on Patreon and take a peek at some pages that haven’t even been posted yet!
I’m streaming three times this week! Join me on Twitch, Picarto, or Patreon while I get to work on some reference drawings for Follower, or thumbnails for the upcoming chapter on Patreon!
Tuesday November 10, 2020: 2:30 PM – Twitch & Picarto
