My Personal Comic Workflow Sharing
Please Note:
This content is a personal experience shared rom working
on commercial magazines and dōjinshi.
It is not a formal tutorial, and it will not cover professional topics such as
drawing techniques or advanced storyboarding skills.
The goal is simply to help people who don't know where to start when
making comics, so they can plan their workflow more efficiently and avoid
some common pitfalls.
Good luck with your deadlines!
Schedule & Time Allocation
First, planning your work schedule is a very important step that
people often get wrong.
For example, if you have
30 days before the deadline
many people might calculate how much work they can finish per day
and simply split the work evenly across those days
This is very dangerous!!
Because the production period is pretty long,
making comics constantly drains both your stamina and your sanity.
By gradually reducing the workload from the early stage toward the
middle and later stages, the schedule will better match the actual
time needed, and help avoid missing the deadline due to misjudging
your productivity.
Workflow
I usually divide the comic creation process into three steps:
Preparation / Drawing / Post-processing
Each step is shown in the diagram on the right.
Most of the key work is concentrated in the
preparation stage.
I'll explain each step in more detail later.
(I won't get into how to come up with ideas -
you're all Idea Men anyway.)
This workflow is structured this way because
comic production can generally be classified into two types of work:
Creative work (brain work)
<------>
Mechanical work (pure labor)
Since making comics
constantly consumes
your
sanity,
it's more efficient to put most of the
Creative work
in the preparation stage.
Once you enter the drawing stage,
you can become
a heartless, drawing machine.
Image Adjustments /
Finishing Touches
Preparation
Drawing
Post-Processing
Concept Planning +
Outline
+
Storyboard
Line Art>>
Screentones>>
Final Artwork
Preparation - Outline (1/2)
There's no format for outlines, plain text works just fine.
The point is that
later you can look back at it to help recall how the
story was planned, so the story doesn't start drifting as you draw.
As for how detailed it should be,
you should be able to
imagine about 60-70% of the finished content from the outline as a basis.
(If you can't, that means the information isn't detailed enough so you
should expand it further.)
You can also just play the scenes through in your head to quickly see
if the outline works.
Many people are afraid of missing deadlines,
so they rush to draw the storyboard as soon as they create the file.
Try not to get into this habit.
Creating comics involves thinking about many things at once.
The more you simplify each individual step, the easier the whole
process becomes.
Preparing an outline first will make the rest easier,
especially when working on comics with many pages.
It significantly reduces the load on your brain when creating
Istoryboards.
Here's a trick my editor once taught me.
Preparation — Outline (2/2)
The purpose of an outline is to
establish story anchor points
and connection points.
It usually includes the following elements:
1. Summary
Helps you confirm the direction of the story's anchor points and
how they connect.
2. Key Shot
Usually the panel features the page's focal character, or another
important moment.
3. Key Dialogue
This is the best information to help you control the direction of the story.
It helps you notice if the story starts drifting off course or if there are
potential pacing issues.
4. Pages per Scene (may be simplified or omitted with practice)
Decide how many pages each scene should use.
This step is highly recommended for beginners
It effectively trains your ability to control pacing and page count,
so you won't have to keep adding or cutting pages.
Try to stick to the planned page count as much as possible.
Avoid large deviations (±1-2 pages is fine).
Preparation — Storyboarding (1/4)
The storyboarding stage is probably what everyone cares
about the most. The quality of this stage will determine your
overall workflow efficiency.
Finishing all the thinking in this stage is the top priority.
Here's a summary of what I've learned from experience.
These are the things I recommend finishing during the
storyboarding stage. Because the content is a bit complex,
I will first list the essential items.
The following pages will explain them in more detail.
1. Decide the key panel / follow-up panels
2. Dialogue + speech bubbles
3. Onomatopoeia + Ideophones
4. Black-white composition balance
(judged based on the full spread)
Let me say this again:
Don't rush into storyboarding finish the
outline first. Storyboarding already requires a
lot of thinking. Avoid trying to think about too
many things at once.
That's how you stay efficient!!
Preparation — Storyboarding (2/4)
Identify Key Panels / follow-up panels
There are several important concepts in comics:
1.
If every panel is extremely detailed = packed with information,
readers will get tired quickly
2.Comics are an industry where "good enough" is enough. What matters
most is that it's easy to read.
3.
The more panels you use, the more you can reduce the drawing workload.
(This will be explained together with dialogue and Onomatopoeia later.)
A key Panel is usually the
key moment
of the page,
or the part where
you want the audience's attention to focus.
A single page should have no more than 1-2 key panels.
This allows readers to absorb the information and moment to breathe.
It's also the part where most artists like to add details -
you can put in as much detail as you want.
follow-up panels (sub panels) are actually more important.
They can be used to
Scene transitions \ Showing position or location \
Building emotion \ Simply connecting the main panels more smoothly etc
These panels determine pacing \ reading flow \ The impact of key moments
like the background music and suspense before a jump scare in horror movies.
Since readers don't need to look at them closely, they can be drawn more
simply to save time.
Here's a small trick.
If you don't like drawing backgrounds,but leaving them out makes the scene
feel empty or makes it hard to locate the characters, you can place the
background in smaller sub panels.
This reduces the drawing workload without affecting the reader's experience.
Preparation — Storyboarding (3/4)
Dialogue + Speech Bubbles + Onomatopoeia + Ideophones
I'm explaining these together because
many people leave this step until after finishing the artwork -
never ever do that!!
On one hand, every element on the page should be treated as a compositional
component.
This includes
text \ speech bubbles \ onomatopoeia and ideophones \ panel borders \
and the page canvas (base tone).
Properly distributing these elements helps keep the page's information density
more stable.
On the other hand, if you only add them in post-processing, there is no way to reserve
space for them. That means all the dialogue and sound effects end up being crammed
into whatever space is left. The page will inevitably become overcrowded with
information, and you'll also spend much more time drawing useless information.
("Useless information" simply means parts that won't be visible in the final or in print
- things that you end up drawing for nothing, such as areas later covered by speech
bubbles.)
The less time you spend on useless information, the faster your workflow
becomes. This is why having more panels can reduce drawing workload.
The more panels you cut the page into, the more unnecessary details you can get
away with leaving out.
Aside: If you plan to use Japanese onomatopoeia or ideophones, you should be
careful. It's like the difference in Chinese between the onomatopoeia
"xīlī huālā" (淅沥哗啦) and the ideophone "chánchán" (潺潺) used for flowing water.
Most onomatopoeia are fine as long as they sound right.
But ideophones have fixed usage and spelling conventions. Incorrect spelling
results in entirely different meanings.
So if you want to use them, it's helpful to
specifically study ideophones.
Preparation — Storyboarding (4/4)
black > white ≥ gray.
Black - white balance
The use of black and white in comics directly affects how complete the
image appears. So it's recommended to roughly plan the balance already
during the storyboarding stage. Enough black makes the page feel more
complete, but too much black can easily overload the image with visual
information. Too much white makes the page look unfinished.
Too much gray is the worst — it makes the image
muddy
and disrupts the
reading flow.
It's recommended to
judge this on a
spread
and try to keep the balance at
black > white ≥ gray.
The balance is determined by everything on the page.
In other words, you can adjust the balance using various elements on the
page. For example, if the page is too white, add black masses or more
hatching. Or use black
onomatopoeia
/ fill the canvas with black.
Many artists transitioning from illustration to comics tend to use
illustration-style coloring logic.
This easily leads to overly gray pages (over-rendering tones).
When the line art already provides enough information, you can even just
fill the areas and skip tonal rendering — which is also faster.
If your style doesn't emphasize line art,
you can try
using other elements to add more black to the page.
And try
simplifying the complexity of tonal shading.
Avoid letting the page become overly gray
- that's the top priority.
Good Luck with Your Deadlines!
Congratulations for making it this far
You're awesome! You've already finished all the
parts that require brainpower.
The rest doesn't require any more thinking.
You don't need me anymore.
Just follow what you prepared in the earlier steps.
And become a ruthless deadline-crunching
machine.
Since making comics is a war of attrition,
maintain a regular routine and plan your work schedule
well. Don't stay up all night drawing just because you're
"in the zone." Make sure you can still produce a
minimum amount of work whether you feel good or not.
Avoid days where your progress is zero
or even negative (revisions). Keep it up, everyone
looking forward to your new comics.