The Process in which I Barely Manage to Accomplish Anything
So, over the last year of working on my comic Huge Hana (www.hugehana.com), I've been receiving messages, tweets and comments regarding process - which, by the way, is a nice way to know that at least someone is remotely interested in your work, so thanks, it's very much appreciated.
My process is really boring.
But, hell, we'll go through it anyway. However, if anything interesting could come out of explaining my process, it would be why I work the way I work ... and to appropriately explain how I draw Huge Hana, it helps to know why I started drawing it in the first place. So first, a bit of background ...
I know, I know, bear with me here.
If you follow this tumblr, then you already know that my creative endeavours are split down the middle between two mediums - film and illustration. And, conveniently, there are two moments that pretty much define my approach to visual storytelling as a whole. And, perhaps not so surprisingly, my parents were responsible for both moments.
The first - when I was six years old, my parents took me to see my first feature film on a big screen - Jurassic Park. Up until then, I was a kid who had almost zero awareness of television and film. It was hard to sit me down and get me to watch something when I would much rather be playing in my room with dinosaur toys.
So, as you can imagine, I was completely floored. Immediately it triggered a strong realization - anything you can imagine, you can make. And if you make it, it's no longer just in your imagination, you can share it with others. I was instantly obsessed with learning how Jurassic Park was made, who made it, and what would it take for me to be able to do the same - Which, turns out, is 80 million dollars and the last name Spielberg.
In the meantime, I made terrible 10 minute movies with Godzilla toys and cardboard buildings using my parents' giant shoulder-hoisted VHS bazooka (An RCA CMR-300 no less!) all the while I continued to consume every movie I could get my hands on.
My parents, especially my mom, were incredibly supportive in that endeavour - although perhaps a bit too much - as they had no problem letting a six year old watch Jaws, Alien, Predator, The Godfather, Psycho and the like. I soon learned that my mom had seen a lot of awesome movies growing up, and each weekend she'd introduce me to another.
I know, so far there's been zero mention of drawing or comic books, but trust me, that last bit was important. See, at this point in the mid nineties, Dark Horse was publishing all kinds of books based on classic film franchises. Just as I was seeing films like Godzilla and Predator for the first time, all of these franchises were re-entering pop culture, thanks to Dark Horse, with a multitude of comics and toys readily available. Because of this, being a kid in a pre-internet world, as far as I knew, the idea of Godzilla or Predator was not native to cinema, it belonged and existed equally in many different mediums.
And more and more, it was the idea of the character, story, or universe that stood out the most to me, not the medium or format the story was being presented in, since it seemingly existed equally in many different forms.
So, in my mind, if I had an original story of my own that I wanted to tell, I figured I should be able to tell it in whatever medium I want - and on top of that, my idea didn't have to be exclusive to any one medium in particular.
Thus, when I wasn't making terrible Godzilla movies to screen for my parents, I was beginning to draw Godzilla comics. Yet, watching my forays into film making, I quickly began to understand the sad reality that not all mediums were equal in regards to being accessible to a kid living in rural Nova Scotia.
And so, drawing became the dominant way I hashed out my (bad) stories. My dad had a home office, so it was pretty easy to just grab giant stacks of letter-sized paper and blue ink pens, stapling together the stack and making up a story, page by page.
Which brings us to the second moment that defined my approach.
With my dad's supply of paper and blue ink pens constantly disappearing on him, he quickly became interested in what I was doing with them, probably more out of bewilderment than curiosity.
One night, age eight, I was sitting in the living room, watching my Jurassic Park VHS for the 80th time and drawing one of the scenes from the movie. My dad came over and saw me drawing one of the Ford Explorers from the film. Since he was a used car salesman, he was pretty familiar with the details of any vehicle. Leaning in next to me, he took one of the spare pens (I usually kept a handful of pens at my side, as I would go through several of them before a drawing was finished) and drew his own Ford Explorer next to mine.
I've included a recreation of both of our drawings, to emphasize the advice he was about to give me.
"The wheels sit under the body of the car, in the wheel wells," He explained, "And windshields are always sloped, not boxy."
Here's a guy, my own father, no real interest in creativity or art, whom I had zero knowledge that he could draw, and he just out-drew me. Blew my mind. Suddenly, details mattered. Paying close attention to an object or character and interpreting it's features was important to me. My dad knew he couldn't draw the technical blueprint of a car, but he knew what defining details to focus on to ensure that anyone who looked at it immediately understood what it was. Very early on, I realized when I was drawing something, it wasn't always about perfect realism or a detailed replication ... it was about caricature and interpretation.
Which brings us to Huge Hana.
Huge Hana is an amalgamation of many ideas, characters and images I've wanted to create for quite some time, so, as I do with any project - either personal or a client's - it was only a matter of figuring out which medium would serve as a the best platform to easily explore those things and hone it into something to be proud of. On top of that, due to the financial realities of my life, not to mention the limited amount of time I have to spend on personal projects, I needed to focus on telling the story in a medium that offered as much flexibility as possible.
So, naturally, a comic is the perfect medium for that story. I can draw in my spare time, and I don't need to rely on budget, intricate production planning or other collaborators' schedules and fees like I would in a more team-based medium like film or animation.
So, ultimately, it's not like Huge Hana should be a film, animated series, or novel but can't be, it's that the story and images of Huge Hana excel as a comic. Today, technology has given anyone and everyone the ability to tell a story in any medium we see fit. So when you're going to tell a story, find the one that feels right and take it from there.
And now, the boring part!
(but probably the thing you actually wanted to read)
So, I'll break down a recent panel from Huge Hana to explain how I go from point A to Z.
First off, Huge Hana is a 100% digital comic. I essentially draw, colour and letter each page exclusively in Photoshop. There are other, better programs suited for drawing digitally, let alone creating digital comics. Manga Studio, for example, seems really awesome, but because I already own an Adobe Creative Suite (I use it daily for all of my film, design and print work) - I simply stuck with a program I knew, and knew well.
Again, by no way is this the most efficient way to work, nor the best. But, like any process, it's become second nature and works for me.
So, I start with a blank page, 300 DPI, CYMK, based on a common page size that traditional (non digital) comic books pages are drawn on before scanning, 11 x 17 inches.
Each page is made up of several folders, like so:
This allows me to keep each different component of the page organized and self contained. By stacking folders, I'm able to ensure that everything exists on the appropriate layers to allow me to move things around very quickly.
TEXT is where my balloons and letters are.
PANELS contains all of the original panel shapes (just the outlines)
ARTWORK contains ... artwork.
Expanding the Artwork folder reveals folders corresponding to each panel, which I call frames (because I'm weird):
Each panel folder has a layer mask that matches up with the dimensions of the panel shape, meaning no matter what I draw on the page, only the artwork that exists in the white areas of the layer mask are visible.
So, let's expand the folder belonging to the panel we're breaking down ...
Even more folders! I tend to micro-manage all of my panels, because it allows me to easily move things around and focus on elements individually. This is one of the amazing benefits of working digitally. Say I want to move one of the helicopters in the panel? Well, I'll just select the entire folder and then move it. Simple as that. No need to erase, no need to redraw. The visual layout and composition of each image is very important to me, so I love to have complete control and accuracy to get the exact image I want, all the while never taking a step backwards. Again, time is of the essence when I need to get a page completed each week and have very little free time to do so.
What follows is a series of images, starting with all of the layers in this panel turned off, and then turned back on one by one. You'll see how I organized the artwork into segments.
However, even though the images are layered this way, it doesn't mean I drew them in that order. With a panel like this, I'll always draw Hana first. After that, I'll simply create the folder containing the background underneath the Hana folder. At any time, I can rearrange those folders or add more in-between, above, etc. Again, for me, drawing digitally is all about freedom and control.
You'll notice that all of the colours for each "component" are included in the folder. This is so that I don't need to ultimately erase overlapping lines to clean up the artwork before colouring. For example, I don't need to erase all of the buildings that are technically underneath the Hana layer, because the colour in the Hana layer will cover them up. Also, by keeping the colours for each component in the same folder as the component itself, I can move both the line art and the colours at the same time. Again, speed, control and efficiency.
If you went in to each folder and turned off just the colour layers, this is what it would look like:
So, as I usually begin colouring after I've nailed down the line art, what I tend to do is simply fill in any one component with a temporary layer of white as I draw.
Which means my completed line art looks like this:
I don't use any special custom brushes to draw. Just a simple standard photoshop brush that's 100% solid with it's size set to the pen sensitivity of my Wacom tablet.
I don't draw on a Cintiq or any other screen-based tablet. I wish I could afford one, but my dinosaur Intuous 3 has served me well. So, yeah, back in the early days of drawing digitally, way before Huge Hana, it took a bit of time getting used to drawing by looking at a screen with my right hand sitting off to my side where a mouse would normally be, but hey, here I am.
Now, while most is, not all of Huge Hana's line art is drawn in photoshop. I often use Adobe Illustrator to draw more complex, geometric shapes like buildings, rooms and vehicles. The artwork in Illustrator is vector based, so I can adjust individual line weights on the fly, which I find really help make industrial objects look nice. This approach comes from my graphic design experience, however, so it's purely preference over necessity.
Illustrator is often used to trace reference photographs and turned them into clean vector line art, but I prefer to still draw it from interpretation rather than recreation. If, for example, a Helicopter is drawn down to the exact detail of the real thing, stylistically it probably wouldn't fit with the more purely illustrative nature of Huge Hana's characters. That, and most of the time the "real thing" doesn't look or feel as nice as the caricature.
From this point, I simply colour the thing. All of my colours exist on their own individual layers. That way I can simply select the colour as it occurs all over the page and instantly change it if I need to. I use the same basic photoshop brush to colour as I do drawing.
Like my drawing style, my colouring style is self taught. Because of that, it's always evolving. Colouring, for me, is a a lot of trial and error, experimentation and smashing my face against a wall. Some of the earlier pages of Huge Hana feature forays and experiments on minimal colours, and frankly, I think they look horrible (same goes for the line art for that mater!) But, you'll always cringe at your older work when you look back on it, so learn from it, keep going and you will get better.
Plus, if you've got the time and energy, you can always redraw and recolour before you go to print!
So yes, that's my process. If people have even more specific questions, feel free to shoot them over to me and I'll do another one of these where I go into greater technical detail. Oh, and I'll refrain from pontificating on and on about my boring life story.
This isn't a statement for or against drawing digitally. There are many approaches to making something, no matter the medium. The key is finding which one works best for you and your story, not which one you think might (or might not) legitimize you as a "true artist" in the eyes of others.
There is a great deal of emphasis and pressure put on a storyteller to acknowledge that the traditional methods of creating art are the "real" way to make something. But look, I wish I could shoot on film, and I wish I could draw my comic on paper. But film is expensive, and traditional drawing is a meticulous and difficult process for me. I don't have very much money, and I don't have very much time. I use the skills I have, the tools I have, and I get the job done and feel good about the results.
In the end, the process isn't what people will care about, so don't worry about the "merits" of your approach. If you have a story to tell, simply use whatever tools you have at your disposal to tell it.
jbbartram-illu
stormborns
yousharknotpass
2087
izzy806
titsay
theartofmadeline
discoholicmusic