Working with layers

I've been walking around with the idea in my head for years. I've always wanted to write and illustrate a comic book, but lacked direction and know how. Recently I've been working a little with Photoshop to learn the program and see exactly what I might be able to do. Below is my first attempt at illustrating and coloring a 'panel'.

For this panel I've selected a scene from the one and only book that I wrote. While I'm pretty sure the book would translate well into a graphic novel, I'm not sure yet how to attack something of that scope. The novel is about 120,000 words, which translates into close to 400 written pages. Some stuff would have to be cut. (Ya think?) So while that idea germinates and blooms, I may try tackling some of my short stories first. Who knows.

Except for the initial drawing this is all digitally rendered. Photoshop has a feature called layers, in which you layer on color and effects while leaving the background and other layers intact, so that you can manipulate and even delete layers at will, without losing work you've done on previous layers. Anywho....here is a sort of evolution of my panel. :



The initial drawing. Pencil in the scene, then ink it.



Next crop away the dinosaur study to the right and clean up the image.




Some basic color for the background, some basic color and textures for the dinosaur and water.



Shading, add a cloud, some color variations, and color for the human.



Add a little splash to the water and some indication of movement streaming from the man.


There. I'm sure I'll do more on this one later, but for my first run it didn't turn out half bad.

Peace.