Greeting Hominerds (I’m playing with what to call my few fans. If you come up with any good ones, let me know)!
Process is an important part of making a comic. I wanted to share where I begin when drawing a new chapter. After I’ve finished my second or third draft of the script, I move onto the thumbnail stage.
I like having all my thumbnails on a single page. That way I can look at the whole story at once and see how it flows. Then it’s just a matter of easy cut and paste edits. You can also look at the design of panels page to page. I ask myself, is there enough variety from page to page or do they all look similar? What pages need to take a minute to breath? Do I need a big panel to really accentuate the drama that is going on?
It’s a really fun stage of the creative process, and can be done in just a few hours.
Neat! Is this process done digitally or with traditional pencil & paper? And how large do you usually work?
This is done digitally. For this stage it needs to go as quickly as possible without tons of thought. This way, once I’m done, I can take a step back and see if the story is flowing well. If not I spend a fair amount of time revising it to a place where I feel like I can move forward.
To that end, It’s not that big. Usually 8 1/2 by 11. Then I add to that if I have more pages (like I have for Chapter 5).