Behind the scenes
Appendix A: The Making of Pages 1-24
First of all, I have to say that writing and drawing this comic has been the most satisfying creative project of the year for me. It demanded a lot from me, and that's partly why it ended up being somewhat thrilling. Keeping on my self-imposed schedule (aiming to be done with each page at 12am each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) was a crazy high-wire act with a lot of frenzy behind the scenes that I deliberately didn't mention was going on most of the time.
I say this because I want people to know that I'm having an enormous amount of fun making Less Ordinary, so I do intend to start cranking out pages again soon. Posting this is not a replacement for that, it's just extra stuff. And I have in fact been sketching new pages lately.
The Tools
Currently, I'm using a Sawtooth model Macintosh G4 minitower from the mid-90s, at a screaming 400MHz with 768MB of RAM. The computer cost $100, give me a break. The monitor is a huge monster I got at a Goodwill computer store, also for $100. I'm using version 3.0 of Photoshop, which I got as an extra with a scanner I bought in 1997 for an incredible $300. It was like 2 feet long and had heavy solid glass and weighed 8 pounds, and it broke during a move and I threw it away. But the Photoshop was a full version, not that LE business, and I've never been able to afford to upgrade it, so I'm still using it. Fortunately, version 3.0 is when they standardized the PSD file format that is still in use today. I do have to run it under OS9-Classic (under OS X 10.3.9), but it behaves well. One limitation that has a significant impact: one level of Undo only. If I make one stroke I don't like, I can get rid of it. If I make a stroke I don't like and then accidentally touch a dot of digital ink somewhere else a second later, I'm committed. Or I have to go back to an earlier saved version. Personally I look at this as a heroic and very manly way to work, without all those effete and foppish 99+ levels of Undo people think they can't live without.
The drawing tools: Cross ballpoint pen (blue medium), Strathmore sketchbook, Wacom tablet, chair, desk, mouse, keyboard.
The Process
I invented the process of turning out pages of this comic while doing it, seeking always to make it more efficient. It does end up being kind of a factory assembly line kind of operation, taking several weeks to produce the first page, but able to churn out a page every two days on schedule when it got up to speed.
The basic workflow goes like this:
- Pre-Production
- Sketching
- Scanning
- Preliminary Page Breakdowns
- Page Layout, Composition and Editing
- Pre-Ink Prep
- Production
- Inking
- Dialogue and Sound Effects
- Coloring
- Finishing
The Pre-Production phase happens on multiple pages at a time, so that a whole sequence is prepped for production at one time. It is more efficient that way, and helps for planning ahead in terms of storytelling.
Production is one page at a time. I start and finish one page before even thinking about the next, because it's all I can handle.
Now that you have the broad idea, I'll take each step at a time so I can talk about each part and show some art examples. I didn't always save copies of the intermediate stages -- too busy trying to get the page done to worry about documenting the process -- but every now and then I remembered to do that.
Pre-Production
Sketching
The stage wherein I draw several pages of "pencils" in my sketchbook, in a fast and loose style. I'm aiming to get down the next few pages of ideas all at once, usually in one sitting. It's almost like I'm just jotting notes for what I'd like to do, except that I actually use these drawings as the basis for the final art. Even though these are much rougher and sketchier than ink-ready pencils usually are, they are not cleaned up.
This is somehow working beautifully for me. For years, my main sketching/doodling medium has been ballpoint pen in an artist's sketchbook (11x14). I get a really fluid line out of a ballpoint, and it can sometimes feel effortless. It often looks messy if I can't quite get a line in the right place, because I can't erase, but a lot of the time I will draw a breezy stroke that somehow captures something perfectly -- a look on a face, the body language of someone in motion.
I used to have a very hard time with the fact that I couldn't use these ballpoint sketches as the basis for a real piece of finished artwork. I would have to, at best, laboriously re-draw the sketches in pencil, and then ink, and I'd lose that ineffable something that I really thought the fast first sketch had.
I got a Wacom tablet about three years ago, but after multiple experiments with it I still had never become comfortable with drawing with it directly -- ie, digitally "pencilling" -- or even with inking over scanned drawings. However, a lot of other artists digitally ink over scanned pencils, so I figured there had to be a way to make it work for me. This comic gave me an opportunity to experiment.
In fact, it started just as a quick and dirty experiment I was doing purely for research purposes. I had been planning to do a webcomic of my own for a full year, and by September 2007 I was very busy trying all sorts of experiments with different real and digital drawing tools, trying to figure out what would be efficient and reliable for turning out pages on a regular schedule. Traditional pencil, pen and ink were looking good but incredibly slow. I knew I'd be lucky to do more than one page a week like that, and that just wasn't good enough. I had to try doing more of the work in the computer itself.
So when I got the idea for the first 8 pages, based on a real-life incident, I figured this was a chance to try out any techniques I wanted. I drew some fast sketches, took pictures of them with my digital camera, and pulled them into Photoshop. I lowered the contrast and brightened the page, making the ballpoint look faint. I chose one of the drawings from the page, traced over it with the paintbrush tool with black "ink", and hey -- I liked the result.
Since then, I have continued to do all the pencilling work as crazy-fast sketches in my sketchbook, making often very little effort to draw them cleanly or what you might think of as being a sound basis for finished work. But it somehow works! Mostly because I'm finally getting to work from the intuitive strokes that manage to get the bold ideas down, because I'm drawing in the way I'm absolutely the most relaxed, comfortable and confident.
Scanning
Getting the sketches into the computer.
As I said, I started with just a digital camera, because I was scanner-less. (My old scanner didn't have a driver for OS X, and UMAX refused to ever make one, for some reason.) I'd take one picture per sketched panel, several per sketchbook page, often ending up with dozens of pictures. I'd capture them in iPhoto and use that to brighten them up a bit, because the camera was always making the sketchbook paper come out as 50% neutral gray instead of white.
It eventually became clear that using the digital camera and was adding a lot of steps to the process of getting them assembled as ink-ready pages, and whacking those few steps out of the process was going to be a big time and energy saver. Anything to make it faster and easier to turn out new pages was my guiding principle. So, I bought a new scanner, I think around the time I was working on page 10.
Because it costs a stupid amount of money to get a scanner that can take an 11x14 image, I have to scan each sketchbook page in two overlapping halves. At first, I fell back on my old habit of scanning at 300dpi, but the scanner was especially slow at this. I realized that high resolution didn't matter, because I was resizing the artwork so much anyway during the layout and composition phase (see below) that the starting resolution was largely irrelevant. Once again, speed was better, so now I scan them at 75 dpi. I take the two scans, bung them together in Photoshop, collapse them into one image file and save that.
Preliminary Page Breakdowns
Where the sketches get reorganized into comic pages. I take all of that newly scanned material and make a preliminary best-guess at breaking it down into 11x17 comic pages in a rough form.
Industry standard art boards for illustrating comic pages are now 11 by 17 inches, so I decided it would be smart to use that size of virtual paper, at 300dpi, for drawing this comic. My sketchbook pages are 11x14, though, which means that there is not a complete correspondence of sketchbook page to comic page.
The extra 3 inches vertically are a little annoying to deal with, actually, because it's not enough height to add another row of panels to the artwork, but pulling all of the panels apart with more room can leave things looking a little empty. I approach this problem anew for each one; it's the initial challenge that gets me engaged in the activity of deciding what, in fact, will happen on this page.
Page Layout, Composition and Editing
In this stage, the sketches are treated as mutable independent objects that can be rearranged on the page, with an emphasis on the visual flow of the whole page and telling the story.
It was when I was working on page 1 that I began to see the potential of working in the digital medium at this early stage, before I start inking. I can take a sketch for a panel and combine it with another panel. I can mirror flip a drawing if it makes the visual flow of the page work better. I can stretch a small panel to be really large, and I can shrink or crop a large panel to be small. I can grab drawings I assigned to future page breakdowns, and I can throw away drawings completely, because I've figured out how to tell the story without them, probably by beefing up the role of a different panel. This phase is where I look hard for what I can cut, that I don't need to tell the story on that page. I think it's strengthened the visual impact and the storytelling to have made some bold choices in this regard along the way.
The first dramatic breakout was on page 6, which originally was laid out like pages 1-5, with a lot of little panels and a lot of dialogue balloons. But by that point, I'd realized that drawing one small panel takes about the same time as drawing one big panel. And drawing two big panels to do a page takes considerably less time than drawing four to seven panels to do the same work. And so when I stretched the second panel (see below) to cover everything and realized that one image told the whole visual story for that page -- Mr. Glasses's incredulous reaction to what was happening on the other side of the table -- I knew I had a lot more storytelling options than I was originally assuming.
Sometimes discarded material is saved to be used in upcoming pages. Other times, I may decide it just doesn't work -- there is one sequence of sketches I did that I liked a lot, but I tried twice to prep it for inking -- spending several hours trying to put the pieces together -- and it never came together as a solid layout. The layout has to feel firm, because it's the foundation level, and something was always too wonky about this sequence of drawings, and so I had to leave it out.
The dramatic example of this was the "Timequake" sequence, which started as eleven pages of sketches, was broken down into eight pages of preliminary page layouts, and then ended up being slimmed down and reorganized (one page decided at a time) to just five pages of the final comic.
Pre-Ink Prep
This gets everything all set for the inking to begin.
After I've got the composition and layout pretty much finalized, the page is massively reduced in contrast and raised in brightness. You may not have noticed this, but the background is never true white, it's always a very faint off-white, a sort of yellowish gray. (Only the dialogue balloons are pure white, which makes them pop out.) The main point of doing the contrast and brightness alteration is to make the ballpoint sketches turn a very faint, light purple that can be drawn over and also erased by a paint bucket fill with a moderately high tolerance (52). It can look faint in a thumbnail or zoomed out, but zoomed in it is still highly legible throughout the inking process, so that I don't find myself losing track of the underlying sketches.
Lastly, the panel borders for the page are set by drawing with the straight line tool and filling with black ink. I might still move panels around after this point -- some of a trickier pages require rethinking and tweaking even after inking has started -- but the general rule is that the artwork and layout are now "locked" and I can move on to the next task with a clear head and confidence.
Summary
This Pre-Production process is, in my mind, highly analogous to working on a film: sketching is like shooting raw footage, the page breakdowns and rearranging of panels is like editing the footage to a rough cut, then down to the final cut. In movies, you then "lock the picture" (stop changing any of the editing or timing), and then you go into post-production to sweeten it all up and polish it (ie, add music and special effects, do the sound mix, and so forth). Except, for the purposes of doing a comic book, that next bit is the Production, not the Post-Production.
Next: The Production stage: Inking, Dialogue, and Coloring