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Working from thumbnails of the strip, we start with 3D shapes to block out the character. In Arthur's case, the head sphere defines the upper part of his head, while a more blocky shape defines his muzzle. The neck and body are roughed in for relative size.
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Here we start sketching in a little more detail, refining the head shape and placing the eyes, ears, mouth and jawline. We also start adding props - in this case, his hat and fright wig.
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Now that the sketch looks more like Arthur, we clean it up and add details - in this case including oversized sunglasses, a fake beard and moustache. (Okay, a master of disguise he's not!) We also start blocking in the background now that his overall size is established.
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With the pencils cleaned up, we now do "baseline" inking - thin, complete lines that define all the areas which will be filled with color in PhotoShop - followed by "coloring book" inking with heavier outlines and touch-ups on important features. Unlike our printed artwork, this is often as detailed as the inking gets for the online comic.
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At this point the inked drawing is scanned into PhotoShop in Bitmap mode at 300-600dpi (depending on the size of the original), converted to Greyscale mode for scaling, and pasted into the panel border as defined by the strip layout. As you can see, we sacrificed some background to sneak Arthur in under the text and keep him as large as possible.
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Once the individual PhotoShop layers are flattened into a 300dpi B&W TIF, the panel is copied to a new file for coloring. The colors here are a little fancier than average, given Arthur's wig, pin and so on, but it's still pretty basic. The strip is converted to 100dpi JPG format using a medium level of compression, and voila - it's ready to go online!
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