Drawing the Pages

So, this process was going very well until it suddenly wasn’t. In the last section, I spent some time drawing the storyboard. The plan was to move on to penciling the next week and hopefully have some finished-looking pages. Unfortunately, I seem to have overestimated my abilities and not only went over my timetable but also did not manage to get finished pages out of the whole process. I’m not going to lie, I am more than a bit frustrated.

Mostly, what happened was that I was working for quite some time on the first one or two pages and then I realized I had to simplify what I was doing if I was going to finish in due time, but since I am not very good at simplifying yet, I only ended up making an additional layer of sketches over my previous sketches.

Drawing process for the second page. Things were going well here, because I was spending more time on each drawing and not worrying about time.

Set up page. Things were still going well. I was patient and took my time with things.

I was already starting to feel the pressure here a little, but I still worked to a certain level of rendering. I think I would have liked to have a better choreographed fight.

Here, I was already not paying attention to the backgrounds and only doing my best to get the general idea on the page.

Same here. In the last panel especially. This might be a good time to mention that I also wanted to include some spot color, both to emphasize the starkness of the landscape and to make Verner pop out a bit.

It’s here that I really started to stress about perspective. I realized that I couldn’t quite place the eyeline and the relative heights of the characters and their environment properly. Not quickly at least. I’m used to only needing to do things like that for a single illustration, not a series of sequential ones that need to be consistent.

This is an example of a page that was difficult to figure out compositionally. I kept rearranging things, and I’m still not convinced it’s effective.

I realized that I don’t know how to draw expressions here. At least not in this “style”. I turned to Aaron Blaise’s excellent teachings to help me. He is an animator, so he knows all about exaggerating expressions.

I spent way too long on this page. Mostly on that house, because I was trying to learn how to use perspective grids in this context. I found some excellent resources online for customizing grids without having to draw them though. Here are two:

Perspective Tools – Interactive Perspective Grids – 3-Point

Perspective Grid v1.12 (reubenlara.com)

I think they are both useful depending on what one wants to draw (I think the first is better for indoor scenes and the second for outdoor ones).

This is where things started getting really dicey, because I was starting to get pressed for time. As one can clearly see, I decided to move on fairly quickly and simply left things in a sketchy stage.

Another one that gave me a lot of trouble in terms of composition. The speech bubbles are taking up a lot of space and I think I should rethink how the images meld into each other to free up some negative space in order to help the whole thing breathe.

I started experimenting with a bit of rendering and some thicker lines here in order to get things down in a speedier manner, but still have it look nice. Not happy about the tool he uses to fix his feathers. I need to figure out a way to make it look more aesthetically pleasing.

The minimal shading does help give a sense of atmosphere here without going into too much detail. This is something the previous pages lack and I would have liked to see more of.

I’m still figuring out how to draw these characters in a way that they fit together in the same story. The little girl’s face is obviously the one that looks the most different from panel to panel. She’s completely new, as a character, and I still don’t know how I’m drawing people other than my main character in this world.

This page was added very last minute because I realized the ending was too rushed, so I ended up splitting the last page in two.

Figuring out Speech Bubbles

A sample of how I was making the speech bubbles.

Conclusion and Some Notes on Time Management

One of my main goals at the beginning of this project was to get better at time management. This was not accomplished in this particular section and it was my main source of both frustration. At the beginning I took too long with the first pages, in the middle I left things unfinished because I was rushing to the finish line, and at the end I sort of found a middle place where the page could look relatively ok without a lot of time spent hatching, but the pages still look sketchy instead of finished.

A lot of this is simply because I have simply never had to draw a comic book like this before and it’s understandable to not know what level of rendering one is able to do for a thirteen page comic in a limited period of time. Another element was my utterly unnecessary hemming and hawing over certain elements that could have been left alone without problem, like details in the trees. Yet another element is my needing to learn as I go, because scene setting and perspective are very different in this context. I’m also learning to simplify and to work with more cartoonish facial expressions, which are better for the final product I’m trying to make.

So I have a lot of reasons to find this difficult, but I still think that I could have done better if I had managed my time better from the beginning and more importantly, managed my expectations.

Truthfully, this entire project is a bit of a lesson in managing my expectations.