Working Methods -- Full Pencils

I do most of my work in Photoshop, rather, most of my time is spent in Photoshop (PS) finishing work that  usually starts as a quick-pencilled thumbnail (typically 4.25"x 5.5", somewhat large by some standards) and then is reinterpreted as a full size pencilled drawing (11"x17").  Although one can use pre-ruled and purpose formatted "comic book" paper, I largely ignore any particular form when I'm scaling up the pencils, so I use relatively cheap and pencil friendly printer paper in the 11"x17" tabloid size, readily available at most office supply stores. One of the most interesting graphic artists working today is Scott Hampton, who  relies heavily on computer tools to compose his final pages, but develops his story-telling panels individually on whatever size and type of paper suits the work. Thus,  he is not constrained by the relatively small working area provided by the 11x17 page I use. On the other hand, once I scan my work and go into PS for detailing, etc, I am pretty much working in an infinite space, but the temptation to overwork fine detail in images that may not be reproduced so generously has to be avoided. I am not sure how my graphic novel will ultimately be reproduced for distribution. It has so far been worked with something like the industry comic book standard 6.5"x10" page in mind, but electronic distribution is probably a game changer.

So here is the thumbnail of page 75 next to the full size pencilled page. Page 75 kicks off chapter four in a story that up until now was decidedly land-locked. So we expect the reader is excited by the change...

The thumbnail breaks the page down into six panels, the first three are displayed in a triptych whose theme is the restlessness caused by sleeping in a bed that is rocking, rolling with the restlessness of the sea.  The fourth panel clearly tells us we at sea, in a dazzle-camouflaged military naval transport, which the reader will have gathered to some degree from the opening triptych. Our  character is then seen out on deck, clapped on to the railing and looking out to sea. And as was established earlier in the novel, he is seen smoking as he "relaxes" under stress.

The full scale pencils (drawn some considerable time after the thumbnail) works and elaborates the storytelling ideas set down in the thumbnail. For some reason I can't actually recall, I re-oriented the  triptych horizontally, thus placing the character's head backwards to the direction of the ship's forward motion. (I suppose) this intensifies the feeling of restlessness, as does lifting the head in the first shot. I wanted to integrate the dazzle camo, the "classic" mattress stripe pattern and the stacks of the transport. The pencils show how this idea is shaping up, with the smoke of the boilers factored in. The finish -- we'll talk about that next installment -- further juggles and refines the idea, although the pencils may be the cleanest, least ambiguous statement of my intent. Doggone pencils often represent the high point of the artistic statement, but usually they must give way to the story telling requirements of the finish elements, which typically impose consistency (read "tone down") across the pages. My favorite elements of the process, however, are the early pencil work and the final composition. The final two panels in the thumbnail are pretty clear with respect to the story, but perhaps a tad too static; how do we make them move? My solution, not fully developed in the full pencils, is to show our guy clinging to the heaving railing, then camera in to show hair and smoke blowing in the wind. If you recall the finish from my first posting, I ultimately combined these images into a single panel, and integrated the blowing smoke into the wall of smoke rising to the right of the page from the restless panels...

Also, a final note, I am not inclined to fully flesh out the final details in the pencils, especially in the backgrounds. Frankly, some problems don't get solved till crunch time, and at the time this page was pencilled, I didn't know what I wanted to do in the finish. It often happens to me,  I don't really "see it" until I hack around some ideas and push the finish. As I said before, I work backwards! Details back to final composition. The professionals wince..

First Steps -- Working Methods

I'm going to look at the steps that went into the creation of the page that is featured in the previous posting. I will look at each step, from the initial sketch/thumbnail, to full scale pencils, to inks  and finally to the finish. Today, the preliminaries, the thumbnails. After looking over these pages, I'll go back to the beginning and tell the how, what and why of my graphic novel project. But working methods first....

These are the thumbnails for four pages from the 4th chapter of my graphic novel, specifically pages 75-78. I drew them on a piece of 8.5"x11" printer paper using an ordinary  #2 pencil. The idea is to get the basic narrative elements from the script broken down into sequential panels. At this stage, I mostly use a simple 3x2 panel grid for each page's thumbnail. Thus a page is fit into roughly a 4.25"x5.5" quarter page, and each panel is approximately 2.125"x1.8". As I mentioned before, many artists fit an entire page into a little 1"x2" frame, so they can focus exclusively on composition and patterns of black and white. I like to get the signal story elements into a tight frame and work on composition later, when work moves into full scale detailing. OK, a professional would tell you that  that is backwards, but there are practically as many working methods as there are professional comics and graphic novelists (at least as far as I have learned from fairly intense study over the last 6-7 years). 

So here we are, the "rough" for page 75, the NW quadrant of the 2x2, is blown up to full size, 11"x17", the standard  size for comic book raw art, and not coincidentally, nearly the size of the bed of my Epson GT20000 scanner. When I first started work on the book, I would print out what is called a blue line version of the rough so I could draw over it in pencil. For most of the book, however, I used the rough for a guide but I redrew each page, typically improving most of the story elements and tinkering with key details. It is much easier tackling each page a second time, after putting some thought into ratcheting up the visuals. The actual proportions one cares about in this format is 3:2 height to width, as the typical professional page stock is ruled for a 15" to 10" working area. Having said that, however, you should realize there are practically no rules in the graphics novel business. If you are not doing line work for a comic book publisher then you can use whatever paper stock you want, in any proportions you like and find convenient. I just happened to have started with the comic book standard. 

A wonderful book to help you get started is:

Working Methods: Comic Creators Detail Their Storytelling And Artistic Processes by Jon Lowe

http://www.amazon.com/Working-Methods-Creators-Storytelling-Processes/dp/189390573X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416593488&sr=1-1&keywords=working+methods

I found it very helpful -- it is one of many I'll cite as I go along in future installments.  

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.