Work in Progress: From Idea to Finished Page

This week, I’m going to walk through how I develop a page from start to finish. I think it’s a fairly typical process, based on little glimpses behind the scenes of other comics creators’ methods, as well as some of Scott McCloud and Dave Brubaker’s writing on the subject. Still, I hope you’ll find it useful, or at least interesting.

Here’s where I started, more or less: a written synopsis of as much of the story as I knew at the time, which I’ve updated regularly as I work out more scenes or plot lines. I’ve carefully cropped this photo to avoid spoilers!

(I still don’t know exactly how the story will play out, though I know a lot of it. In On Writing, Stephen King talks describes how sometimes writing feels more like unearthing a fossil than creating something new; like it’s there, and you’re just trying to reveal it as well as you can. That’s what this has been like for me.)

From there, I started breaking the broad overview down into scenes, and then into pages. For example, here’s the script for the first page. 

As you can see, the early page scripts were fairly vague in their descriptions of each panel. The result was that drawing the pages took a lot longer, since I was working it all out on the page.

A few pages in, I finally started adding more specific descriptions of actions. In some cases, I also indicated what perspective the panel would be from. 

If I was writing for someone else to draw, I would have to do more of this. My goal is just to remember what I saw in my head, since it may be weeks from when I write to when I draw.

As an example, here’s the script for page 10, which went up on the website on Monday of this week:

The numbers indicate which panel is which. I’m mostly using a 9-panel grid for Harold, breaking that only for impact (or when an action is more horizontal than vertical). 

The next step is rough pencils. This is somewhat misleading, since I’m working on an iPad Pro, using the Procreate app. Essentially, I’m working out placement of characters and backgrounds in each panel. I work in light blue here, both because it will stand out from the black I use later, and because pro comics artists often do their pencils in blue. (They do it using a non-photo pencil so that only the final inks will copy; I do it to be more traditional, I guess.)

Here are the pencils for page 10:

Keen-eyed observers will notice that I made a slight change when I actually drew this page: I decided that we didn't need to see Harold both put something into the safe and actually close the safe, so I used the extra panel to make the final panel double the width.

From here, I start on the final lines, using black and a different pen type. I’m sort of able to condense two stages of comics production here; rough pencils are often followed by tight pencils, and then by inking. I occasionally go back over the roughs with a more careful attention to detail, but that’s usually when I’m drawing something tricky (or struggling to get it the way I want it).

Here’s the final black line art for page 10. Notice that, in this case, it’s very close to the rough pencils. 

The next step is color. Working in Procreate, like most digital art tools, allows me to isolate different parts of the work on different layers. The rough pencils were on one layer, then the inks are on a separate layer, and the colors go on a third. 

The color layer goes “under” the ink layer so that the colors are behind the inks. Procreate also allows me to set the inks layer as a reference for the color layer, which means that I can drag and drop color to fill spaces, but it will stay inside the lines.

Here’s page 10 with colors:

And, just for fun, here’s what the color layer looks like without the lines:

After that, all that’s left is lettering and speech bubbles or boxes.

I created a font based on my handwriting to use on this project, but I haven’t been using it. Procreate doesn’t do text, and Photoshop ran very poorly on the computer I was using, so I’ve been hand-lettering each page. This is more tedious than anything else.

Once the lettering is in place (again, on its own layer), I draw speech bubbles or frames around it, and fill those with white.

After that’s done, I carefully save and back up each page, and then it just waits until the appropriate week to post. I’m currently working on Page 25, and posting a page every week, so this page won’t go on the site for another fifteen weeks.

And there you have it: a broad overview of my page process. If you have any questions, or want to know more about a particular aspect of the work, leave me a comment below, and I’ll answer it in the next few weeks.

Thanks for reading. Come back next Monday for a new page, and next Thursday for a new blog post.