So I thought I'd give you guys the inside scoop on how I work when it comes to making a comic book! It's not really that exciting but here it goes.
The first step is getting the script. This time I haven't written it. Instead I'm working from a script by the comic book genius
Eric M Esquival, you may have read some of his work on Thor: Unkillable Thunder Christ, Blackest Terror, The Legend of Oz: Wicked West, Adventure Time or even Calabrese issue 1. Anyway once I get the script I give it a read through and start sketching up the characters. In this book the main characters are based on actual people: the worlds greatest horror rock band ™
Calabrese. So I start in on drawing those guys since that will give me a bit of a feel for the book.
Sometimes a character is hard to get a grip on. Bobby in this case so I'll spend some time playing with that character trying to nail down a look for him. Still not 1000% happy with his design...
Once I get some of the characters and stuff done I go back through the script and quickly thumbnail the entire book. These thumbnails are really rough. basically its just something that lets me get positions of characters down, a feel of what the book will look like when it's done. These thumbnails are tiny, no room for text at all but I have to block in areas where I think the text will go. I'm pretty sure most people would have a hard time reading these thumbnails but to me they're the spine of the art that's going to come later.
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| Thumbnails: lots of tiny hard to read pictures. |
After I've finished roughing out the book I scan in all the thumbnails. Once they're scanned I print them out at roughly 8.5" X 11", a decent size to work with. This is the stage where if someone were to see what I was working on they'd see something that looks like a comic book. I take these blown up thumbnails and begin the task of actually drawing the comic book. I'm working with a Prismacolor Col-Erase violet pencil. Why? I don't know its just the pencil I tend to use when doing my art. Some times I'll use a mechanical pencil with B-hardness graphite or another color of Col-Erase (usually tuscon red). What ever tool I'm using its got to be dark enough that it over powers the cyan that I've printed the blown up thumbnails in.
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| Blown up thumbnails being refined with tighter pencils. |
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| Better look at the pencils for page 1 |
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| better look at the pencils for page 2 |
During this stage I'll also go back and design some other characters, props, etc. Just so I have a break from the hard part of drawing comic pages. Designing stuff can be more fun than the actual comic page drawing part. Especially when the stuff you've got to design is monsters.
Once I finish this stage of penciling, I'll scan everything and blow them up to 11" X 17" and print those out again. From there I might have to tighten up the pencils, adding details that were too small to draw at this stage, maybe redraw some things, then it's time to ink.
I'll show you those stages in the future.
Until next time...
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