Ryan Maloney walks through drawing a page of his graphic novel The Night My Bed Turned into a Submarine in Procreate, from rough sketches through inking with the Studio Pen to coloring with pre-selected character palettes. He layers flat colors first, then adds shadows and highlights on separate layers to keep the process fast and repeatable across many pages.
Chapters
Today I'm going to be drawing a page from my graphic novel, The Night My Bed Turned into a Submarine. I just picked up one of these handy Sketchboard Pros, so I'm going to drop my iPad into it, load Procreate, and get started. Here's what the final page is going to look like. I'm working in Procreate as usual to sketch and ink this page. The Studio Pen is my go-to pen for all drawing. When it comes to sketching, don't worry about making things final right away. Always start out rough and build up. As you see a line you like, create a layer on top of that and make that a little bit better and a little bit cleaner until it feels right. But don't feel like you have to get things perfect right away. All right, sketch done. Let's add some smooth lines on top. Let's talk about lines. One thing you're going to want to do is vary the pressure of your lines. If you push hard on the pen, the line will be thick. If you push light, the line will be thin. Also, just think less when you're doing your inks. Move fast, and the undo button is your best friend. All right, enough talk, time for a snack. There are a few things in life as good as a sliced apple with cinnamon, but the apple needs to be sliced just right and use a criminal amount of cinnamon. All right, let's go add some color to this drawing. Before I started this graphic novel, I picked out the colors of all my characters. I wish I would have spent a little bit more time on this, but I wanted to get things moving. But all the colors for each character are saved in my color palette, so I really don't have to think when it comes time to coloring. The first thing you want to do when you color is lay down all of your flat colors. Don't try to add too much depth. Don't try to add your shadows, your highlights. Just get your flat colors down and we're going to build up just like your sketch built in the lines. Our colors are going to build up on top of each other. Now, when I'm coloring, I like to keep the process very simple so I don't have to think every time I make a new drawing. My process is flat colors and shadows and highlights. And sometimes I'll reverse the shadows and highlights just to see what something is going to look like. But for the most part, I'm thinking that that's my process so I can focus on just getting things done. Let's add in some background details behind the character, drop in some highlights and some pops of color. Highlight some text. Now it's time for the shadows. Shadows are pretty easy. All you do is you have your flat color on one layer and then you add another layer on top of that and turn down the opacity. So anything underneath that shadow or that top level will be shaded. I'm not too precise with my shadows or my highlights. I like to move quickly and get things done. There's so many pages in this book that if I spent so much time on each page, it would take forever. All right, that's a wrap on this page. Hope you learned a thing or two. Make sure you like, follow, and do the subscribe thing and follow on TikTok @ryryeart. Thanks for watching.
