As I jump headlong into the actual production process of my newest graphic novel, THE UNKNOWNS, I thought it would be fun to talk about my process, what I’ve learned and how that might help all of you!
I have written and drawn one graphic novel already and started up the process on a second title before ultimately abandoning it and over the course of this process I have learned one thing in particular. Organization and planning are EVERYTHING! In my first book, I sorta went on the fly with a lot of things. I wrote and drew scenes one at a time over the span of three years! That lead to a very disjointed process, though the final product I think is still quite strong. With The Unknowns I wanted to try and do things the way I have always wanted to.
I decided that before I did anything I would spend my time getting my script in order. I wrote the entire thing before I started laying out the book in anyway shape or form. After the book gets in good order script wise you can thing move confidently into the thumbnailing stage. The script phase is the best for fixing story problems and getting the order of things in the proper place.
For this project I sidestepped the thumbnailing process altogether. I find the thumbnailng process kinda cumbersome. Not because it’s not important. It’s just that once I know how many panels I want on a page, I just sort of know what I want there. So with this project I took my script and moved through the entire thing breaking it down into panels, and pages. What this let me do is get my page count in order, and start planning for how long this thing will take me. At 130 pages long and a deadline of 6-9 months, it lets me know that I need to be averaging around 3-4 pages a week to hit my deadline (head spinning).
After my page breakdowns are in place, I then decided to go ahead penciling my book. I pencil my comics on 8.5×11 printer paper with a template I designed to fit page break downs. You can download the template right here: comic pages layout and a four pages version that I plan to use once I get a better handle on characters to move even quicker: comic pages layout 4 pages
I do very loose pencils that then get scanned back into the computer, gridded and printed out to be inked. Here’s an example of what my pencils look like ready to be printed.
From there I start inking. Which if you have been following me on twitter, you will know I have been a bit divided on lately… I arrived at a decision with it and I will share with you all more of that next time. I hope you’re enjoying this and get to work on your own project!