Hoi, I have art question if you don't mind me taking up your time! How do you usually do rough sketches/layouts? I'm curious, especially since my method is what you could politely call a mess.
Don’t worry, my initial rough sketches and comic layouts are definitely abysmal, too! I’ll use BACKLASH page 268 as an example of how I work (this applies to all the art I make - if a piece of mine isn’t a comic page then just remove steps 1-3 and the process is exactly the same, haha)
1) Script. I work from a script that probably doesn’t meet any of the industry script-writing standards, but it’s fine because I’m the only one that needs to know what goes where. Here’s what the script for this page looks like:
(I color-code the script as I do thumbnails. to visually represent to me what part of the script ended up on which pages (because I work on a ‘as many pages as it takes’ system rather than a ‘this chapter will be 30 pages’ system, haha))
2) Thumbnails. Now it starts to get unreadable. I draw my ‘thumbnails’ on full 8.5x11 sheets of printer paper. I have a hard time visualizing space if I don’t do thumbnails physically on paper, and this is also why I draw them fullsize instead of tiny. I can’t tell if a layout will work or not unless it’s the exact size of the space it’ll be taking up. (I don’t know if I’ve met anyone else who does it like this - I am the odd one when it comes to thumbnailing, I think, haha)
I write the dialogue directly onto the rough layout. This is the most important part of the process for me, because it forces me to make sure there is enough room for the dialogue and speech bubbles in each panel so that they don’t end up being crowded.
3) Panels and Speech Bubbles. At this step I move from traditional to digital. I have a page layout template that I copy the thumbnail into and then fit the panels around the page. (I do this so that my gutters are the same size from page to page.)
(my template looks like this–
–each pair of lines are on different layers, so I can easily move them/copy-paste them about the page to follow the borders on the thumbnail I’m working with. (I do panels by hand when it’s action or when I need to do something wack, but for the most part this is how I streamline the panel-creating process.)
I finalize the speech bubbles early on in the process for the same reason that I write the dialogue on my thumbnails - so I can see the space I’m left to work with.
4) Sketch. Draw the dang thing!
5) Lineart / Blacks. I’ve started using solid black in BACKLASH, so I do both steps at the same time.
6) Color! My least favorite step, my true enemy.
Aaaaand rinse and repeat over and over again for years and years, and that’s art, baby!