I’m happy to announce that work has begun on the first issue of my comic, Gamer Girl & Vixen! Our artist, Gemma Moody, is hard at work penciling the opening pages of our first issue, and from what I’ve seen so far, she’s gotten even better than when we first discovered her! This comic is going to look gorgeous!

In fact, here’s a sample of Gemma’s work! It’s the new social media cover image she drew up for us!

As I mentioned before, we’re looking to put out a single, stand alone issue on our own, then we’ll be launching a Kickstarter next year to produce a full-length graphic novel (which will include that first issue as a first chapter!). Gemma’s already got a few pages done from when we first started the project and tried to pitch it around to publishing companies.

So for this week’s behind-the-scenes look at the making of of Gamer Girl & Vixen, I’m going to share with you the process of going from initial page sketches to completed work! I think it’s a really nifty process to witness, and I’ve dug up some of Gemma’s original work to share with you all after the jump!

Gamer Girl & Vixen is the story about two costumed criminals who meet cute and fall in love. It’s a romance comic in a superhero universe, and the first issue is all about how the girls meet and find themselves instantly smitten.

The preview pages I’m going to show you are from the middle of the first issue. The girls are on the run from security officers, but still have time to get to know each other.

We start out with what’s called a ‘thumbnail’, and it’s just a quick sketch of the page. I’ll get into scripting in a future article, but basically my co-writer Kristi and I wrote the script and mapped out the panels as we saw them, then we turned the script page over to Gemma for interpretation. We lucked out in that Gemma has some great design ideas of her own, and she spiced up the panel lay out for us.

One of my favorite traits of Gemma’s art are the facial expressions! Even at this sketch stage, the girls look great!

Next comes the pencil stage. Gemma uses her thumbnail as a guide and draws out the page how it will look when finished.

Everything gets sharper in pencil, from the characters to the panels to the background. And those faces still look great!

Next up is inking, which adds definition and shading to the pencils. Some people use a separate inker, but we hired Gemma to do both. And she’s clearly not just a tracer.

After inking comes the colors! Once Gemma was on board as penciler, she wowed us with her colors as well, so we gladly gave her those duties too! In most professional comics, coloring is done by a completely different artist, but Gemma’s work is quite awesome!

At each stage in the process, Kristi and I signed off on Gemma’s work. We had some revision suggestions here and there, some coloring ideas; it was a team effort.

The final step was lettering, which Gemma also provided – though we may have a pretty cool announcement about lettering in a few weeks! Just need to get all the details sorted out.

And that is a completed comic book page, from beginning to end! It’s a very involved process, but Gemma works like the Flash! She’s already delivering thumbnails and pencils on the new pages, and maybe I’ll share those in a few weeks time!

For now, I hope you enjoyed yet another behind-the-scenes look at Gamer Girl & Vixen/ If you haven’t already, please feel free to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. We’ve still got a long way to go to make this project a reality, and the bigger audience we have, the more success we’ll find. So share this article, tell your comic book loving friends, and help get the word out! This thing will only succeed because of readers and fans like you!

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