So here's a video that shows the construction of one of the pages from the book.
Some things that I need to say up front - this sequence shows how the pages are constructed, but doesn't really represent my process, which is waaaaay messier than you might think from just watching this.
Also, each page in Gigs took around three days to make (this film comes in at about 76 seconds!)
And this page is possibly the simplest in the whole book (a single panel, with a very limited colour palette) - pretty much every other page is a lot more complex than this one :)
You'll see here that I start with a pencil drawing. (I work @150% - I'll reduce the image for print after it's all finished)
This drawing gets scanned into Photoshop @600dpi, and then I'll drop it into a new CMYK document as a semi-transparent layer ...
After that I put a background layer of flat colour underneath it and from there I ink it all digitally using a very old and battered Wacom Bamboo tablet. In Photoshop I mainly use a hard round brush tool, 6pt., though I'm not averse to the gradient and soft round airbrush tools as well...
Usually there are several layers of black line art - I think of each scene as having at least a foreground, middle distance and background - often there are more depths stacked in there.
Everything gets flatted with base colours and then I hatch/scribble layers of highlight and shadow on the coloured layers to give things a bit of heft and weight and mass. Most of this colouring goes in underneath the black line art layers.
I'll usually include some layers of 33% black just to scuzz the image up a bit and give the background elements some texture (in this case, it's mainly about the brickwork)
Then there are layers of highlight to make the bulbs glow, and the sound effects - again using a reduced opacity to give the image more depth.
The final slide here shows the outline added to the foreground figures - it's a tiny thing really, but it does just lift them away from the rest of the image slightly.
