From drawing board to print

Here's an example of how the Rasher strip progresses from the initial drawing to the printed page. I'm not showing the full strip obviously. Just one panel. After having my script approved by the editor, I set to work penciling the strip. Above is a shot of my original artwork after I'd penciled and inked it. I've blown it up a bit for this post but I do actually draw the strip about twice the size of the printed version. 

Next up, I scan the strip at 300dpi into Photoshop as a bitmap. This means that the blueline pencils don't show up on screen. I clean up any mistakes, convert to Greyscale, and fill in the solid blacks on Dennis' hair and any other large areas of black (as it's quicker than filling it in by hand on the physical artwork). 

Next step is to convert it to CMYK and apply colours with Photoshop...

When the strip is finished, I save it as a TIFF and e-mail it to the Beano office. The Beano staff letterers add speech balloons based on the dialogue from my script. Several weeks later the finished job appears in print. Here's a preview of the issue that's out today...

That's the brief version of the procedure anyway. I hope it's of interest. 

The Beano is out now, priced £2.