Graphic Design & Illustration · Guide
How to make a comic book from scratch
Story, thumbnails, pencils, inks, color, letters. Here is the full pipeline, what each stage is for, and why your first comic should be eight pages rather than a graphic novel.
The Nextversity teamGraphic Design & Illustration schoolUpdated August 10, 20266 min read
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The short answer
The pipeline is: story, thumbnails, pencils, inks, color, letters. Every comic, from a webcomic strip to a printed graphic novel, goes through some version of those six stages.
The advice that matters most: make your first comic eight pages. Long enough to need structure and short enough to finish, which is the only thing that teaches you anything.
Stage 1: story
Not a full script with dialogue polish. A page-by-page plan.
Write what happens on each page and roughly how many panels it takes. Eight pages, eight lines. If your idea does not fit into eight pages, it is a longer story and it will not be your first one.
Decide the ending before you draw anything. Comics that start without an ending become collections of nice drawings.
Stage 2: thumbnails
Postcard-sized, scruffy, fast. Each thumbnail is one page, with rough panel shapes and stick figures.
This is where the real work happens, and it is the stage beginners skip. Thumbnails are where you find out that page three has too much happening, that the reveal on page six needs a bigger panel, and that two pages can be one.
Redraw thumbnails five times. They take four minutes each. Redrawing a finished page takes a day.
Stage 3: pencils
Now draw the pages properly, at final size. Work at 300 dpi if there is any chance of printing, with bleed.
Three things to keep in mind:
- Reading order. Left to right, top to bottom, unless you are working in a format that reads otherwise. Panels that break this confuse readers without them knowing why.
- Character consistency. The same face on page one and page seven. This is harder than it sounds and it is what character sheets are for.
- Leave room for words. Balloons take space. Composing a beautiful panel and then discovering the dialogue covers the face is a rite of passage.
Stage 4: inks
Line work over pencils, whether by hand or on a layer above.
Vary line weight: heavier lines on outer contours and objects in front, lighter lines for detail and distance. That one habit does more for depth than any amount of rendering.
Stage 5: color
Flats first: block every area in a solid color on its own layer. Then shading over the top.
Use color to guide attention and separate planes. A limited palette per scene reads better and is faster to produce, which matters when you have eight pages to finish.
If you are working in Procreate, clipping masks make flats-then-shading straightforward, and there is a blending guide for the rendering side.
Stage 6: lettering
The stage that most obviously separates amateur from professional work, and the one people spend the least time on.
- Use a proper comic font, not Comic Sans and not a handwriting font with no upper and lower case pairing.
- Balloons follow reading order. Place them before you finalize art if you can.
- Tails point at the speaker's mouth, and cross as little as possible.
- Keep text away from balloon edges. Generous padding reads as considered.
- Break lines by meaning, not to fill the shape.
Clip Studio Paint has comic-specific panel and lettering tools, which is why so many comic artists use it.
A beautifully drawn page with bad lettering looks amateur. A simply drawn page with good lettering looks professional. Lettering is the highest-return stage in the whole pipeline.
Page and panel basics
- Six panels a page is a comfortable average. Fewer for big moments, more for busy sequences.
- Panel size implies time. Big panels feel slow, small panels feel quick.
- The bottom right panel of a right-hand page is the page turn. Put your hooks there.
- Gutters (the space between panels) should be consistent. Inconsistent gutters read as a mistake.
Printing it
Work at 300 dpi in CMYK-safe colors with 3mm bleed from the start. Print-on-demand services handle short runs and local printers suit larger ones.
Retro-fitting print specs onto a finished RGB comic at screen resolution is a genuinely miserable afternoon. Set the document up right on day one.
Where to learn it
The comic book creation certificate covers the full pipeline: story, layout, inking, color and lettering. Character design and concept art covers keeping characters consistent, which is the skill that makes a multi-page comic possible. Krita is a free option if you need one.
One subscription opens the whole Graphic Design & Illustration school.
Eight pages. Thumbnails first. Letter it properly.
Questions people ask
How do I start making a comic?
Write a short script, thumbnail the pages at postcard size, then draw. Starting with a finished-looking page before the story works is the most common way to abandon a comic.
How long should a first comic be?
Eight pages. Long enough to need structure, short enough to finish. A first attempt at a graphic novel almost always stalls somewhere in chapter one.
What software do comic artists use?
Clip Studio Paint is built for comics with panel and lettering tools. Procreate and Photoshop are both widely used. For lettering, many artists move to a vector app for crisp text.
Do I need to be a great artist?
You need to be a clear one. Comics are read quickly, so readable storytelling, consistent characters and clear panel flow matter far more than rendering skill.
How do I get a comic printed?
Print-on-demand services handle short runs, and local printers suit larger ones. Work at 300 dpi with bleed from the start, because retro-fitting print specs to a finished digital comic is painful.