I’ve experimented a lot with the process I use to draw comic pages. I used to go straight to the 11 x 17 piece of Bristol Board and go at it. Then, after a few years, I came to my senses and realized that doing thumbnails actually does help. The reason is that it puts most of the pacing and composition work at its own stage. Flying by the seat of your pants and trying to lay it out and compose on the fly while you’re penciling will most likely give you an inferior page. It’s too much to think about at once. I don’t think multi-tasking is your friend here. It’s best to break down the process and focus on one step at a time.
Different artists do their thumbnails in different ways. Here’s where I am at the moment and, of course, this will change as time goes on. But it seems to work for me right now.
I bought one of those comic page layout pads that Canson put out. You could just as easily make your own in Photoshop instead of spending the cash, which I’ll do from now on. But, in a moment of laziness I figured it was worth it to have a handy stack of layout pages.
Each page has four layouts per page with a space for notes. One thing I don’t like about the Canson page is that it’s incredibly hard to pull a page out of the pad without it ripping. I assume they thought a comic artist laying out a comic would want to keep it all bound together.
So, when working on our creator-owned books (like Deputy Witch, for example) we work “plot style”. That is, we know the entire story, all the acts, major and minor events and scenes, and the conclusion. We know vaguely what the dialogue is, but don’t write it all out until the page has been finished. Marvel used to work this way, but now that writers only get paid upon completion of a script (or so I hear) the plot style isn’t really used there anymore. Some indy guys still use it (I hear Jeff Smith of Bone fame does) and that’s the groove that seems to work for us.
So, I get the blank sheet of layout paper, freshly ripped and mangled from the pad. If I were one to write open letters to companies, mine to Canson would explain how you really need to be able to remove the paper from the pad so the opened cover, and all previous pages, aren’t constantly interfering with your arm while you move around the page. Also, it makes it more difficult to get a decent scan of the page.
Anyway, fresh sheet…ripped. I make notes in the notes space they’ve provided to remind myself of what the major elements are on the page. I figure out how many panels would best work, the pacing, and some dialogue ideas and what the emotion of the characters are. You can see my scribbling on the image below. At this point I might even make a thumbnail for the thumbnail. I do this because I’m going to do my final thumbnails really tight and then scan, blow them up, and print them out on the final 11 X 17 art board to finish out the pencils.
I use a cheap mechanical pencil at this point. I make sure when I rule my panel borders out that they’re level with the borders of the page so when I print them out they’re not crooked on the final drawing. When I’ve figured out what’s going in each panel I draw, as detailed as this size will let me, the entire page. I consider this moving into penciling territory since some things will go straight from this to inks, though most of the figures and faces will have to be tightened up with pencils after I print.
When a page of thumbnails has been finished, I scan the page in at 400 dpi, grayscale. 600 dpi would probably be better, but at the studio we have an older scanner that gets problematic at higher resolutions.
Once scanned, I copy and paste the thumbnail of one page into a Photoshop template of a comic book page. the page looks like this:
It’s the usual non-photo blue ruled edges that show trim marks and dialogue area and all that. Once I copy and paste the thumbnail in, it’s very small…so I have to transform the size to match the drawing area. It gets a little pixelated, but that’s okay. It’s only to serve as a reminder and indicate the layout and figures.
I adjust the levels on the layer that has the thumbnail to lighten up some of the background smudges and darken up some of the lines.
Then I create a new layer on top of the thumbnail layer, and set it to SCREEN.
Now set my color to pure 100% cyan, and fill the screen layer. This turns all the lines a non-photo blue that will make it easier to eliminate in the final scan. Here’s how the printed page looks:
Now the page is ready to be tightened up in with finished pencils and then inked. This may sound like a lot, but I can actually move faster this way since I have broken down the process into manageable chunks. You can see the finished page here.
This is how I’m handling laying out my pages at the moment. I may stumble across a better way or refine this one, but at the moment it seems to work.
-Brian
