Best Comic-style apps is Manga Studio and Corel Draw (Media Brushes!!!) gives you great looking inking. Been using Project Dogwaffle 4pro for coloring.

I found that a cross Painter-Photoshop workflow works well, where most of my hand inking is done in Painter, especially with the scratch tool.

Concerning the lack of money selling originals, I agree that it is a problem though high quality, possibly limited edition prints could be an alternative.

However, end of the day I still prefer pencilling the roughs by hand. Inking digitally or by hand both have their pros and cons and I’m still 50-50. However, a brush and ink can be so nice, though its easier to separate layers for dig inks.

I think it’s a matter of personal taste, really. It doesn’t matter what the “pros” are, I know artists that would rather shoot themselves than draw digitally. Some people hate staring at a computer screen for hours on end, and some just can’t get past the loss of the tactile feel of pencil on paper.

I, on the other hand, have sometimes struggled with “fear of wrecking good paper” and with my traditional pencils there were always bits left unfinished for the inking stage. Where I sometimes struggle to sit down at the drawing table, I have a bit of a puzzle-solving OCD way of working on the computer, and drawing on the computer taps into that and avoids the fear of “wrecking” anything by putting pencil to paper. It loosens me up a lot and gets rid of any of that fear of blank paper that I often struggled with.

Also, when I have to switch back to the “day job” (animation storyboards) schedule, normally any momentum on my comics would be shot if I was working on paper (and another desk). But, I find it very easy now to just open up my comic file and draw a figure or two up to a panel or two every morning as a warm-up before switching over to the storyboards. It’s keeping my momentum on comics going while working the day job – albeit at a snail’s pace, but better than stopping altogether for 8 months at a time!

If you have the forethought to draw and ink characters and BG’s on different levels, it can make edits a lot easier.

As far as the ‘re-sizing and tweaking forever’ goes, which is, I think, what you wanted comments on, a few months ago I started doing my thumbnail layouts for the remainder of Wahoo Morris digitally for that reason. I tend to do a lot of re-sizing and tweaking and shifting by hand when doing the pencils anyway, so I figured it would speed up, or at least simplify my layout process. And it did. One sequence that was written as 4 pages, but felt cramped once it was thumbnailed out, through cutting and pasting and resizing got expanded to 10 pages with only minimal drawing.

My initial intention was to just do layouts digitally and to print them out and trace them for the pencil stage. Next thing I knew, though, was that my thumbnails were coming out more detailed and I was doing final pencils digitally.

I’m using Manga Studio, so there are a lot of tools specific to it (and not in Photoshop) that make my life a lot easier – like the perspective rulers. I’m no longer tapeing multiple sheets of paper together and trying to keep a 3 foot long ruler in place trying to find that distant vanishing point. And the ability to draw a character on one level (or multiple levels) and the BG on others means I’m no longer erasing an element that’s drawn properly while trying to work out an element that isn’t. Like for example, say I drew a character with their hands in front of their face, and I just couldn’t get the hands right the first time, I can do my scribbling and erasing on another layer without damaging the drawing of the face. I also recently drew two people kissing, and it was looking a little off, so I drew the head in behind (that was mostly obscured) in full on one layer, then drew the head in front on another layer, then erased what shouldn’t be visible of the first head, and I had a nice convincing shot of two people kissing.

I’ve tightened up the layouts into final pencils on thirty some pages with another thirty some to go, so it’ll be another few months before I have to figure out how to ink them. I posted some examples, including a stage by stage walk through of one page up on my blog if you want to take a look.