First, I sketch the comic - usually in ordinary pencil - on a normal sheet of 8.5"x11" paper. I scan it, and it looks like the above.

Using the ruler lines in Photoshop, I draw tidy panel boxes with the rectangular marquee, fill them black in a new layer, and then shrink them. I work at 4x the final size of the comic until the last step, so I reduce them by 20 pixels, then delete the smaller rectangle. Sometimes, like in the lower right of this example, I leave a panel open. If I haven't been very neat in drawing the original sketch, I may drag around bits of artwork to make them fit into the panels.

I put a white layer underneath the sketch layer, then reduce the opacity of the sketch layer to 50% or less, so I can see what I'm doing when I go over all the lines in black.

Using my Wacom drawing tablet and a new layer between the sketch and the panel borders, I "ink" over every line from the original sketch that I want to keep with a black, round brush. I have to make sure that I completely enclose every area in the drawing that will be a different color from its neighbors.

I make the sketch layer invisible after all the inking is done, and create a new layer just under the ink. I set the paint bucket tolerance to 160 and start filling everything in. For colors I use frequently, like everything in the girls' costumes and the pagets' fur colors, I have "swatches" saved with all the colors and what they're for so I can use the eyedropper tool to pick them up from there. For everything else, I make it up on the spot if it's new, or pull it from a prior comic page if it's been shown before. A few effects, like the feathering on Rowan's wings, I add by magic-wand selecting the background color and then using a differently-shaped brush to add the pattern. The cloud pattern I use for Earth's sky is just a Photoshop filter called, imaginatively enough, "clouds". Other special effects, like the glowing on recently-defeated beads, are done in low-opacity extra layers.

I shade and highlight in the color layer with the burn and dodge tools. Even when I don't do a very good job at it, this makes the picture less flat-looking.

After shading, I reduce the comic to its final size - 655 pixels wide and 870 pixels tall - and letter it in layers that go on top of all the others. Although I have to have some idea of what will be said in a comic before I draw it, I don't decide on the final wording until I've gotten this far. I'm more verbose when I have more room to write without covering up too much art. This comic also included a language that I didn't render in the English alphabet. I don't yet have fonts made for the constructed languages, so I have to write those letters by hand with my tablet. Once all of the words are written, I make one or more layers between the panel border layer and the text layers for the speech bubbles. (I sometimes need more than one if I'm going to have a lot of speech bubbles that need to be able to crisscross over each other's connectors - like in panel 3 of this page.) I use the oval marquee tool to select the speech bubbles, the paint bucket to fill them, and the polygonal lasso tool to connect them to each other and make arrows pointing to the speakers. Then I select everything in the bubble layer, make a new layer right on top of it, fill it all in with black, contract the selection by two pixels, and hit "delete" - that makes the borders of the speech bubbles.