Journal #9: My Evolving Process
When I worked on the adaptation project, I was a little loose in my planning: I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do, so I mapped it out, tried to place the text, and then went for it on the real deal immediately. When working through my final project, I noticed I was planning things much more meticulously. I spent a much larger amount of time on my thumbnails, focusing on creating a grammar for the comic and generating the dialogue and text that the comic would contain. I think, in general, the final project has had more prep work done to it: we created character sketches, workshopped thumbnails, and have been tasked to draw expressions and hands for our characters. We’ve taken a lot of class time to workshop our ideas with each other, so overall, I’ve ended up feeling more prepared.
Aside from the extended preparation work, my process is typically the same: I start with a warm-up doodle, and in thumbnails, the art comes first, then the bubbles, then the finalized words. When I start the project, I have a vague idea of where I want to the story to go. Then, I plot out what I want the panels to be; how big they are, how many of them, and what goes in each one. It helps me set the pace for my story. I found that, in creating the layout for my final comic, I relied heavily on a manga series I was catching up on instead of the comics we’d been reading in class. I found myself more inspired by the storytelling strategy from the Japanese manga than the comics we’ve read. This could be partly because, instead of reading American comics as a kid, I was always nose-deep into different volumes of manga. As a result, the storytelling and panel layout techniques feel more familiar to me, so adopting them into my own strategies feels less forced.
