It’s been a while since I have documented one of my pages from start to finish. I though maybe everyone would like to see what happened with the latest page?

Generally what happens with the writing process is, I sit on the idea for a week. Thinking about the best way to progress the story. The aim for each page is to end on a scene that I think will either make you laugh or smile, or keep you intrigued enough to return for the next page. After the week has gone by, I generally have enough of an idea, that I draft out a rough blurb of whats going on. I keep a physical notebook to write my ideas, and story break downs in. The page itself, I’ll write a small description of each panel. That generally will let me know if I can translate what is in my head to a page that effectively communicates it.

Once that is done I throw down some thumbnail sketches. Sometimes I’ll do some varying layouts, sometimes I’ll get something that I think works right away. Often times I’ll work on something, and change it when it comes to the actual drawing. Nothing is really set in stone at this stage. Generally I use the thumbnails just to get an idea of page layout. I don’t tend to use them for the planning of the actual drawing. My thumbnail sketches are generally really small.

After that, I get straight into the page. I draw in my panel grid. Then get onto the sketching. Which is usually loose. After the sketch, I throw in the text, just to make sure I have enough room, and no images that are important are cut out of the scene.

After I’m happy that everything looks as though it is flowing, and a reader can understand it. I move into the actual drawing. Tighten things up. This part of the process takes the longest time of course. I like doing it, but it is time consuming. Especially with more panels, and the backgrounds I put in. I think that stuff makes it all worthwhile though.

Then I’m onto the home straight. I add in the colours, make sure there is a light source thing going on to keep the characters grounded in their scene. My colour palate generally is very bright and bold. I like punchy colours. I find this comic is pretty light in tone, so I try to communicate this with the colours. I try and make sure that the colours highlight the areas I want your eyes to see. Pushing characters that are important to the foreground. Objects that aren’t as important I’ll try and push back, with a warm versus cool colour mix.

Add it all together, and you get the final comic! Hooray! Hope you enjoyed this look at the process.

Thanks for reading,
Marc

Usually when I am preparing a page I’ll just keep going on it until it is done. However, without being sure how awesome this new format would be I saved a few steps of the comic to check and see if I was happy with how it was progressing. Being that the comic is now smaller, some of the things I took into consideration were, does the text size and art size still hold for readability? Will I be able to successfully condense my storytelling so that it can convey the same message without the same amount of space? How would the page look on the site?

One of the issues I had with the traditional page format was, you always had to scroll down to read the comic. For those people that might just want to have a quick browse and then carry on with their day, I thought, maybe I could make this more efficient. The other thought of reducing to this size was the aim of getting more updates out a week. If I could draw smarter it would hopefully be beneficial for me in that people could now get one extra update a week. Which also helps me add to my archive faster.

The challenge is of course. Having never drawn in this format before, that I need to be smarter with my page layouts, and get my point across quickly. I like a challenge though. With any luck, no one will even notice the format change and people will be happy that they’ll be getting an extra update every week. I’ll let you know soon when I’ll make the jump to twice a week.

Thanks for reading!
Marc