Creating a Work Flow

Having to work on a 24 page comic for the first time is a little daunting.

The goal is to figure out how to finish pages quickly without losing any quality. There are some tricks that I have picked up from other comic artists, either through discussion or reading about their process, and have tweaked for my own purposes.

First: Nail the THUMBS!!!!!!

I have mentioned in previous posts that this is a more recent discovery and you would think a no brainer. I have always made thumbnail sketches in the past but never to the extent of clarity that I do now. This is my least favorite part of the process because my brain usually hurts by the end of it. I try to exhaust every panel layout, black and white composition, camera angle, and character pose to make the page as interesting as possible. I am hoping through time that this part of the process will come with ease. It's a lot more work up front than I'm used to, but it gets rid of any guess work and makes the next steps of the process fun! ( Thank you Shawn Crystal for making me create better thumbs)

Second: Pencils

This part of the process I am still experimenting with. Instead of sticking to one page and rendering the entire thing I render the characters and the backgrounds separately through passes. It's very much a "strike while the iron is hot" method. If I get warmed up drawing a particular character why not go through the entire comic then and knock out their pencils and be done with it? I am mentally still trying to get used to it. Before, when I finished whole pages I felt like I had accomplished something, but with the penciling in passes method all 24 pages do not look "completed" until the last few days. I'll get used to it though.

(This method I swiped from Guy Davis, and he knows how to get comics done!)

Third: Inking

This is the longest part of the process for me, and usually takes me a day per page. I will experiment to see if the same method of working in passes will work just as well as it did for the pencils. I will discuss this step more at length in a future post.

Until then here is another penciled page from Snow White: Through a Glass, Darkly. Enjoy!