We have been working on finishing up the last few stories for Fight for Amity and as I’m drawing one of the pages I thought it might be interesting to do another post about our process. Not like we haven’t done that before but it’s always fun to see how the drawings progress.
So during the first step when I’m laying out a page I just keep things super loose. This is the thumbnail phase of the design. While reading the script or story I’ll either do very small drawings of rough shapes to work out the best shots to tell the story or sometimes I will just go ahead and work actual size on an 11X17in comic template I made in Photoshop. Either way this phase is always kept very loose and quick just to get the ideas out. I will usually work out where the speech balloons and the panel borders are in this stage.
Step One: Thumbnail
During the next step I lower the opacity on the thumbnail drawing and then sketch out the scenes with a little more detail. In this stage everything is still kept loose I just focus a little more on defining the drawing and making sure all my forms and perspectives are set up properly for the next stage. It’s important to still stay sketchy so that I can still continue defining the drawing in the next stage. Otherwise if I get too tight in the second stage I will just end up almost tracing the drawing in stage 3. Then it just feels like I’m doing the work twice and nobody likes that.
Step Two: Rough
And the next step is just the clean up. In this stage I’m still working on the actual drawing and not just tracing the rough stage. I just use the rough stage as more of a foundation and then I’ll go in and focus on the final details while drawing over the rough. Now obviously there are blank space in the clean up image and that is so Jesse can insert his characters into the scene.
Step Three: Clean Up
Well that’s about all for the steps. This story is going to be black and white or maybe it will have some gray tones. If the page has color or any gray tones that is the final step.
-Anthony
-Anthony