Step-by-step art process for strip for March 20, 2022

It's been a long time since I've shown examples of what my strip looks like step-by-step in the drawing process!  Years, even!  Several years.  Let's plop down a more recent example.

Above is the penciling stage.  I probably should have removed the word bubbles for this image, whoops, since while the words come first, the word bubbles come last -- I want to make sure I don't create any tangents with the word balloon tails and it's impossible to know where to set those down until everything's there.  But everything else seen is finished pencils, once I've gotten done drawing left-to-right.  Second panel is an example of laying down a pre-existing background first so I can do a wide shot with characters properly staged.  I turn down the opacity and draw blue pencil people over it.  Dina's hands in panel 3 are a mess, aren't they.  

Panel borders and inks!  Dina in panel three is actually on a separate layer above everything else, because I wasn't sure at first if she was going to intersect with anything else in the other panels, and plus I had a feeling I might need to pop her out separately for stuff later.  Panel lines are erased behind her.

Flats!  I use the paint fill tool to make everybody their established colors, eyedropped from their character models.  This includes drawing the plaid on Becky's shirt, which involves painting darker green, white, and orange over her green shirt with 50% opacity in a certain pattern.  Lips and cheeks also come in this stage.  

Backgrounds!  I un-transparent the second panel background, and also create a background behind Dina in panel three using a preexisting file of Dina/Amber's dorm room closet wall, but warped and extended using other new lines to create the corner.  Tiny bits of the dorm room closet wall are seen behind them in panel 1, and the flat color of the wall is painted behind Becky in panel 4. 

Shading!  Rather than show the finished version of the strip here, I've unselected the color flats layer so you can get a better look at what the shadoes look like.  (there's also highlights, I suppose, which you can't see in this form but are apparent in the finished version)  In most indoor shots, I use a dark red for shadow (it makes things look warmer), but dark reds don't shadow well behind, well, dark red things, such as Becky's hat.  So the shadows on Becky's hat are black.  Note where the shadows behind Becky in panel 2 fit around the pre-existing shadows painted on the plush velociraptor in the background art.  Dina's shadows are on a different layer so that they can be set at a higher opacity setting, making her shadows darker.  

The final strip!  Flattened and saved at both print and web size.  Note I added a starburst effect behind Dina.  It's pink!  Apparently that's the color of Pants Euphoria.