Comic Report #26 - Something Old, Something New

I got a jumpstart on the next comic page and managed to get a good bit of it done this week.  I expect I should have it finished by this time next week, if not by the end of the weekend. I did a lot of little things on this page, so without further delay I'll share my process thoughts with you!

While I was doing my cast page research last week I spent a lot of time in my comic's archive, and I felt like the way I used to paint pages had a certain kind of character I might have lost sight of in making my more recent pages.  Things had a lively rawness to them and I feel like as I progressed in my art style development things got a bit smoother, so for this page I want to make the lineart a bit more ragged and rough, and I want to paint my figures with better contrast like I used to.  I didn't get up to painting a figure yet but I'm going to get to that as soon as this post goes up.

When I started out making pages I built a set of rules for how I structure the panels.  A page begins as rows- each row is a "paragraph" of the page, and within that row I divide it with vertical lines to make sentences, and then sometimes if I need an extra beat I'll add another horizontal sub-division in one of those sentences. This structure means that the hierarchy of solid, unbroken lines guides the eye from one panel to the next in the correct, desired order.  I'll sometimes bend these rules to achieve abstract things (as in pages 389 and 460) but as a standard rule this is how I build my pages. When there's more action I'll build around four rows but if there's more talking I'll structure around three so each row has more vertical space to fit word bubbles in.  When I started out I had six panels as my baseline and sometimes remind myself it's okay to fall back to this number, which I started to do with this page.  

The middle row has a third panel to flesh it out to seven, and that's because as I was drawing it I condensed two of my thumbnails into one page to sort of speed things along.  I think I mentioned this in the last page but if a page doesn't have a strong punchline I'll often condense it and the next page into one moment to get to the point with less dilly-dallying. 

Speaking of which, I think that's all the major notes I have so far. I'm gonna jump back into working on this page, and based on the camera angles (I really only have one long depth-of-field perspective shot left to paint) I should have this page finished and posted soon.  

Thanks for sticking with us!