Art Journal 012: Blocking In Panels

I used to stream my workspace while I made comics, but I’d only ever broadcast the inking or painting phases, the latter being so slow-crawling a process that I am convinced no one actually wants to watch it.  Painting backgrounds is usually more engaging because more obvious things happen more often but when I’m painting my figures it’s a lot of subtle work all over the place that it is legitimately hard to follow, and I acknowledge this.  There’s one phase of my comic I’ve never streamed or really showed anyone before and that’s the sketch phase, when I’m laying everything out in anticipation of my inks.  I’ve shown off the finished product of this phase plenty of times but I’ve never actually let anyone see the process of arriving at that product and the reason, quite frankly, is because I make a tremendous mess of everything.

To use an analogy which is possibly out-of-scale, the sketch phase itself is not unlike the billion years before the earth became stable enough to sustain life.  It’s a time where mountains rise and fall and rise again; where oceans thrash and magma is just everywhere and changes the face of everything it touches.  It’s a period of utter chaos which, accidentally, produces the necessary ingredients for the future development of a narrative continuation of a comic book story, and for the first time I’m going to try to explain just what goes on between the thumbnails and the inks of my art.

As you might have seen in a previous article (Art Journal 001b), thumbnails are a very rough idea of panel arrangement and positioning of important story moments within the page.  This doesn’t necessarily translate directly to the page, because often I might break up a moment here or feel a panel perspective there might need a new angle, so it’s mostly just a loose guide for me to actually build my pages with.  The actual building of the comic involves a lot of planning, reference and decision-making.

At the top of this article is a series of progress shots of the first panel of the next comic page. The first image is a pretty good example of how all my art starts out: blocking in my figures.  When I was a young artist I used to start by drawing the eyes, and then draw a complete head, then complete shoulders, a complete arm and so on. I fixated on details in localized areas and my figures looked stiff and disjointed because I wasn’t considering the subject as a holistic single element, I was breaking it into its components and rendering each one individually.  As an older and wiser artist I block in my figures entirely before I start working towards details, saving me a tremendous amount of time in case something doesn’t work out and I have to erase it (this will be relevant later).  Start big, work towards small; or as I like to put it, you have to bake the cake before you can start putting the frosting on it.

This panel is a continuation of the previous page, where Sheriff Tanner coarsely enters the diner with two of his deputies.  His aim is to march purposely to the back corner booth and meet someone, so I wanted to make him the focal point of the panel.  When I block in a figure I often start with the ribcage as a big oval because that’s your center mass and that largely dictates where all the other parts of the body will go.  I used to start with the head first but predetermining the head’s position and angle rigidly defines where the neck can go and from there the torso and that can hinder your ability to draw the pose you want, especially in physical media because “shoot I drew a really nice head but it’s wrong so I gotta erase all that work”.  The center mass blocks in first and a little mark to represent the sternum gives the torso a sense of space and direction, like the T-marks we often see on faces.  I also like to block in either the angle of the collarbones or, if I’m drawing thick clothing, the angle of the collar itself because that can further help define position and perspective at very little cost- a narrower collar, like === represents a puffed-out chest or perhaps a lower camera perspective, whereas a deeper cut like \_/ shows a more frontal eye-level perspective and a relaxed or slouched torso position.  I draw the circle for the head (I think of my heads as “sideways eggs with masks on the front” to help make sure I give the bowl of the skull plenty of room to actually contain a brain and I’m not drawing a too-small oval behind a face) and drop in some facial plot lines to rough in the expression I wanted, in this case a raised assertive chin and a displeased scowl, hinting at his reasons for being here.  With Sheriff Tanner I treat the shape of his whole upper lip muscles as the shape of his entire thick moustache so a more acute angle with plenty of space overhead means a pursed frown.  I keep his eyes high on the face to show he’s tilting his head back to put his chin out, establishing an aggressive tone matched by his squared shoulders.

With Tanner as the focal point and the room’s perspective drawing all angled wall lines- and by extension the viewer’s eyes- towards him, I establish the rest of the scene around him and try to fill that with useful contextual information so the page isn’t just an angry man with a moustache standing in front of a void.  Lizzie is on the right, slouching against the counter.  She held the camera in the previous page and in this one she’s handing it off to Tanner, so by following him with her eyes the camera can find a new subject and she can become a background element; keeping an eye on the Sheriff also means she’s aware and attentive, like this is the break she was just thinking about.  I wanted to give her a sort of tired look, like she came here straight from Marcus Malloy’s jobs office and was put straight to work.  When I’m blocking in legs or arms behind torsos or anything with layers I’ll often use a bit of shading to distinguish the rear leg from the front one, as it can get pretty confusing when it’s just pencils.  It’s also much easier to actually do, you just zigzag your pencil and boom, you faked perspective.  Since I have her body leaning on the counter I want to put her weight on just one leg, since that’s the way most human bodies work, so I give her one straight load-bearing leg and I bend the other leg at the knee, resting her back foot (currently unseen) on its toe.  This might seem like a minor detail to worry about but the human body is a holistically-connected series of moving parts- when one piece moves all of the other pieces around that move as well to compensate, and when all of THOSE pieces move the pieces around them move as well.  So you can never really just move one arm without also moving the angle of that shoulder, the pitch of the neck and the twist of the spine and ribcage, and by extension the weight distribution of the hip and the legs beneath it.  She’s slouching so her whole body has to distribute the weight slouchfully or else it’ll just look like she’s bending forward.

To the left of the Sheriff is the rest of the party embroiled in their conversation.  Alice and Lou are still chatting but Monday’s head pops up attentively.  If I draw no one else in the restaurant paying the Sheriff any mind then by contrast the reader will notice that both Lizzie and Monday are watching the proceedings and this is narratively important to them for their respective contextual reasons.  Where Lizzie is more directly in the shot because she was the previous focus of the camera, Monday is a bit more obscured to give the sense that his attention is a bit more subtle and quiet.  He’s tucked away behind a block representing the rest of the booth row and he’s got Lou and Alice’s heads in front of him, their backs to us.  He’s slightly hidden but he’s still there, watching.  Whatever happens is very interesting to him.

The second and third iteration of this panel are pretty self-explanatory, but I’ll explain them anyways.  Start big --> work small.  Now that I have my shapes and angles blocked in I can start playing with details.  I’ll rough in the Sheriff’s big nose and moustache and emphasize his expression with a pair of thick eyebrows.  Lizzie gets an expression and a bit of subtext- she’s watching but she’s tired, side-glancing with her chin propped up in her hand, she’s passively interested or at least politely discrete in her observation. I’m also lowering the height of the countertop because I drew it a bit too high for Lizzie to prop her elbows up on, I do a lot of lasso and moving in this phase.  Monday’s expression is a bit more animated, which is something rare for a man like Monday.  The two deputies are blocked in behind the Sheriff and they’re positioned in the specific way they are- with the bald one on the left and the one with round glasses on the right- because when they get to the booth they’re going to I want the bald one to sit next to the man who is sitting in the nearer-side booth and both Tanner and the glasses deputy to share the opposite booth, blocking the subject into a corner directly across from the Sheriff with one specific deputy on one side and the other next to the other gentleman, and there’s a very specific reason I want them to be arranged this way.    

So that’s basically the shot blocked in.  I can go ahead and start adding in bits of detail like the mirror on the wall behind the cross-back crew’s booth, frame in the window and start putting the order receipts up on their little order pins around the counter- there’s seven of them so I gotta block in enough space to fit them all and make sure the height variances match the last two panels of the previous page.  Everything’s looking pretty good, I can say this is enough to ink off of and move onto the next panel and--

--oh dangit I forgot the *pool table!*  One of the major features of the Jade Dragon is the pool table they dragged into the walking space!  It’s something sporting to play that doesn’t require too much space or any amount of electricity so it’s a low-cost diversion and it’s supposed to be right where I drew the Sheriff standing!  I put the Sheriff right in the center of the page, too, so I can’t just put the table on one side of him or the other, it has to go in the middle and he has to be walking around it, but he ALSO has to be maintaining his forward momentum and his assertive presence.  What this means is that basically the entire Sheriff I drew is wrong and it has to go.  I can’t just slide him to the side and put the table there because he’d be turning his body to scoot around the table and it’s currently very aggressively forward-facing.  This also means I can’t just have his arms pumping since they’d bang into the table, so I have to redraw those.  His torso is on a new angle so his head has to go, I have to block that in again too.  

One little detail i hadn’t accounted for and I need to reassess everything I’ve been doing.  The mountains crumble, the oceans churn; this is the heart of the time before life where the world is shifting and shaping itself, and this is the primary reason I never actually streamed this process, because this happens a lot.  It isn’t just because I forget prop locations either, I might not like the angle I’m exploring or I might need to position the camera to put the right people in the right spots in a panel, or if there’s combat I might be trying to find the best angle to fit everything I want to into a frame, like the kinetic action of a shot, a hint of the positioning of the characters from a previous moment and a foreshadowing of where they’ll likely be in the next moment.  These are often little details a reader might not consciously ever be aware of or even care about but they are the driving force of my blocking-in stage.

It takes me a bit of figuring out to try and get Sheriff Tanner’s body to do what I want it to do while still being a focal point but also without covering up too much of Alice because I want her to be back there making the group shot nice and full to tuck Monday behind.  Tanner’s hand rests on the table edge thumb-forward like he’s giving it a little push in passing and his other hand is motioning to his deputies, who are now trailing with a bit more lag to fill out the space.  Molly’s feet are propped up on the counter behind them but I also decided to let Lee peek into the scene as well, putting him in a good position to interact with Lizzie in a future page.  I finish blocking in the rest of the seven orders above the counter and give the pool table a little shot of blue to help it stand out from all the figures crowding around it- the blue is a big help in picking out shapes in tons of detail and I use it sparingly so it doesn’t get too messy either.

That’s basically a breakdown of how my pages make the jump from thumbnails to finished sketch layers.  There’s a lot of thought that goes into everything and I make tons of changes constantly.  It’s a very messy stage and I’ve never actually shown it to people before because I didn’t want them to think I was clumsily hacking together my figures over the course of several hours.  Maybe someday I’ll stream this phase, but for now here is a rare peek into the raw process of making a primordial comic.