Production on book 2 has been slowly building up to full steam. Admittedly I am very behind on schedule. This is mostly due to the fact that the script was difficult to get to a place where I felt I had done enough honing and it was workable. I think I have taken this book and thrown it out maybe four times now… I’m on my fifth iteration of it.
But now that I at least have a solid first act it felt like it was time to get to work on inking and penciling pages. So I’ve found myself stolen away in the nooks and crannies of the office look for places I can work in quiet.
In this book I am dealing with one big concern in particular and that’s that this book is scaling to be somewhere around 190-220 pages, compared to the first book which clocked in at 155. Production wise, I have no idea how I will hit the kinds of goals I tend to set for myself. So I have been rethinking this whole process of penciling and inking the book and how I track them all. I mostly want to force myself to push through my penciling and writing phase so that within the next six months or so I have a finished rough draft of the comic I can share with my critique circle and get their feedback on. Hopefully this will really reduce the amount of changing that takes place to the story after it’s all said and done. But what it also does is let’s me have all the heavy brain work out of the way. It’s all, butt in chair, hands on stylus from there on.
I have also been looking to eliminate this stage almost altogether:
Thumbnailing pages. Now thumbnails are super important to this process, but I think I can just distill them down and get rid of a step. I tend to do like four passes on a page before I start inking it. The first is the page break down, where I go through my script and break it all down into pages and panels, then I do a small thumbnail on the page, then I pencil it and then I tighten the pencil…. THEN ink. That’s too many. I think I can basically skip the small thumbnail phase and do my thumbnails as rough pencils, then tighten those up before I ink digitally. This could be a disaster, but I think it’s worth a shot even if it gives me back just 10-30 minutes per page.
I am inking pages finally, and that has been going more slowly that I expected. Just kicking the dust off of these old tires. Case in point, I had inked this panel before realizing I messed her design up quite a bit. Went back in a fixed it:
I had started using Manga Studio 5 for this book to begin with, but I have really been having an issue with it lagging down and generally making the process harder for in the inking stage. So I couldn’t have non of that. I switched back to Manga Studio EX 4. The inking engine in EX 4 is just, in my humble opinion, much better. I feel like the current inking engine in EX 5 presents too many issues and lagging problems. Going back to old faithful has let me focus on the work and not the software.
I hope I will have more news to share as the book continues. Stay tuned for more!
Great update. Really can’t wait for Book 2. Will there be a kickstarter campaign for this or do you have enough other backing at this point?
Either way, count on my support again.
hey Stephen! I expect to do another Kickstarter in the future. Not sure exactly when yet, but I am hoping early next year. I so appreciate your support.