Ryan Andrews

Ryan Andrews is a comic book artist that grew up in Southern California and now lives in Japan. Two of his comics, ‘Sarah and the Seed’ and ‘Our Blood Stained Roof’ have been honoured with an Eisner Award nominations in the Best Digital Comic category.

To create his work Ryan Andrew creates small thumbnails to quickly sketch out the different panels and then once he’s got the initial idea of what he wants to create he then copies the thumbnails onto a bigger piece of paper and takes more time on them to make them better quality than the first lot of thumbnails. He then uses a Bristol board and a Kuretake brush pen to create the final version. He starts off by sketching out the basic layout to make sure the composition and placement right. After the basic lines are drawn on with pencil he then goes in with his pen and adds the details. He then creates textures by using a piece of water colour paper and experimenting with watercolour paints to create a variety of different textures to then experiment with digitally using Photoshop. The benefit of editing it digitally to apply colour is that watercolours don’t work well on the Bristol board as they tend to run and also causes the ink to smudge and also using Photoshop allows you to experiment a lot more and gives you a variety of options and allows you to undo changes that you’ve made without ruining the whole piece. He creates the textures using a variety of materials such as brushes, rags, salt and anything accessible. He then scans the texture and drawing in to edit it digitally and uploads it to Photoshop. He then experiments with different settings such as multiply filter on the textured layer to have the texture over the image to add depth. Also uses masks to apply darker areas to add more tone and to create a 3D effect and also to highlight certain areas of the panel. He also creates silhouettes digitally by using the selection tool and then applying a gradient to give a 3D effect and add further details and to create a full scenery. He then repeats this process for each panel and then combines them all at the end to create a full comic strip.