Other important characters in the J-man's story are his friendly zombie Laz and the big black stripper named King. Oh, and the archangel turned superzombie Gabriel. These three have also been drawn by at least one previous artist but I tried to put some of my style in all of them. The most obvious thing I did was to give Zombie-Gabe thorns growing out of his body here and there to make him look more evil.

Ok, so how do I go about to making a finished comic page? I thought I'd show you guys two examples from the upcoming JHZ book here:

1. After reading the script I do a VERY simple thumbnail sketch to see how I want the layout to work. Pretty often I get an image of a panel in my head right after reading it in the script and so I don't always need to sketch it out on the thumbnail before starting with it. So if a page has several pretty easy panels that I get a feel for right away, my thumbnail sometimes is no more than the panel layout.

2. Pencils and ink. I draw on A4 paper because it saves time. I like drawing small and I feel that I can give the panels a tighter more intense feeling when I work on smaller paper. I sketch the panels with pencil and then go over it with ink (pen not brush) and tighten it up, place shadows and add most of the details. The more I draw a character the less I need to do with pencil. Since I don't always have the time I really need to finish my pages I try to save time by holding of on the big black areas, which is time consuming to do by hand. Instead I fill the in with the paintbucket or similar in Photoshop.
There. Pen and Ink done.

3. Now for the scanning the page for the computer. After the scan I adjust the levels and contrasts as to get the lines really dark and even. Then as mentioned earlier I fill in the black areas. When I shade a comic (or color for that matter) I prefer to work with Photoshop's Level function with basically means that I have the lineart in one layer and the greys in another. When I'm finished I can easily merge these to levels without getting any unwanted white outlines which I seem to find often happens when you work with layers.
After the shading is done I take a separate image file were I've made some graphic which I "blend" into the page by shifting opacity on the layer and tweaking it a bit. And... it's done! Now I hand it over to Stephen for lettering and possible sound FX.

So, that's how a page in grey is done, but throw some color on this article I thought I'd show you one of the methods I use when coloring a piece. This picture is a poster for a signing event for the the release of Vol. 2 in April/May.

Steps 1 and 2 are the same as on the comic pages.

3. Now I turn the image file into RGB so I can use colors. Then I use the level function again and puts in some color, but before this I duplicate the b&w image and hide one of them for later use. As you can see I only use one nuance of each color and it looks pretty flat and boring right now. But I merge it with the line art like earlier.

4. Now I go back to working in layers and create a new layer on top of the colors. This layer I put at a 50 % opacity and then I take the brushtool and with black starts to shaded it. After the shading is done, I merge this layer down into the color layer and turn the brush into color dodge mode and puts it at about 10 % opacity and start to put in highlights. Finally I bring back the hidden b&w on which I remove the white areas so that I only have the black line art and merge it down on the shaded and highlighted layer.

Then I add some scratches and stuff to give it a bit of feeling.
And it's finished!

Thanks for letting me tell about the way I work and hope that at least some of you reading it found it interesting and maybe even useful!

My website/online gallery is www.terrortub.dinstudio.se

Comment on the making of Jesus Hates Zombies.