Life cycle of a page

The images below demonstrate the series of steps that went into the creation of the final image. The first image is the initial pencil sketch, a thumbnail drawn on roughly 1/4 of an 8.5"x11" piece of printer paper. I typically fold a sheet into quarters and draw 4 thumbnails. Many comic book artists create smaller thumbnails, even as small as 1"x2". I focus on developing images for the action  in the text. Others are more concerned with composition and patterns of black and white, with minimal actual drawing. The second image is a redrawing of the thumbnail at full 11"x17" size, mostly in pencil, and it may involve several iterations of drawing, scanning, editing and printing the image in "blue line" for further development in pencil. I an inclined to leave any notion of frames and gutters out of the composition until the very last stage, after the text has been added. Most of my finishes have been in Photoshop (PS) over either scanned pencils or drawings developed in PS. But here we see two separate exercises inking by hand, using a number 2 sable brush and pro black acrylic ink. Some straight lines are drawn using Copic markers and straight edges or other drafting tools. The first inking pass is really a much too literal interpretation of the pencils, but it is not without its charms. I re-inked, putting more expression in the effort and focussing more on backgrounds. I also decided to combine the two images on the bottom of the page,  first by eliminating the left image, then in the finish, to find a little something in both images. Since I wrote the story, I have a lot of freedom either varying the art or the script as needed as the work progresses. The final image is rendered in PS, but elements of the hand inking remain. I find it is much easier to iterate to a final look in PS, with a great variety of tools to resize, scale, rotate, etc.