how do you plan out a comic? how much of a comic series do you plan out before drawing individual panels and strips?
OKAY SO QUINNS GUIDE TO PLANNING A COMIC FOR DUMMIES
(this is just for one strip at a time)
first thing i must relay to you all. i am not doing this alone. @notedchampagne has been my handsome rock for years and years
step 1. brainstorm an idea. what are we telling a story about. for our current series, we have a large cast, obviously everyone wont get the same amount of screen time, so its good to just be honest with who you give a shit about and what kind of stories you'd like to tell with them. our current comic is about a bunch of people being invited to and attending a pot luck. simple
step 2. create a rough outline for what youd like to happen in that comic. the general approach i have for ours is 1-2 pages per story, so we dont get sick of scripting boarding of scripting boarding inking and shading the same conversation for like six pages. its closer to the format of a newspaper comic, but still maintains continuity between entries. when doing the outline we consider how we'd like the characters personalities to come off and what information about their hobbies or lifestyles we should inform the reader, since this is their introduction
step 3. this is the scripting. once we have an idea of what we want the comic to be about and what beats wed like to hit, i sit down and write up a script. its about 90 percent dialogue, 10 percent stage direction. i script everything myself but regularly ask sam for feedback if i hit a wall. i also have to be mindful of how long a script is, if theres too much yapping it can turn one page into two, doubling the work
step 4. the boards. when the script is finalized, sam takes it and does a rough sketch of the panels and characters digitally. this keeps things loose and i can suggest changes. i give them very little direction before they board so sometimes a scene will look completely different from how i was imagining it in my head in terms of staging or character poses. they also add the speech bubbles with the dialogue, this helps me visualize how much room ill have to play with during the final
step 5: final sketch. i take sam's rough draft and recreate it on paper. they have very minimalist sketches, so i have to draw in hair styles, clothes, do more detailed expressions. this is also when i do little edits to the dialogue to help it flow better, or if i thought of something funnier, or if it wont all fit in the speech bubble. i used to do the panels with ruler but i lost mine so i use literally any straight edge avaliable
step 6. inking. this is somehow the most tedious, the most relaxing and the most nerve-racking step. there is no going back. i use a fuck ton of pens like the zebra brush pen, fudenosuke brush pens, pigma sakura brush pens, microns, black gel pens. anything to help get the job done. i work from top to bottom to try and avoid smudging the graphite. if i fuck up here. oh well. this is when i add texture to clothing, hair and backgrounds
step 7. editing. is this cheating i dont care. rather than being insane and trying to manually clean up ink lines with white out or something, i just take a clean picture of the finished line art in a brightly lit room and upload them to my computer. from there sam cleans up anything i missed or fucked up. or draws something i was too lazy to do like nnys tattoos i am not fucking drawing those every time
and thats it. that last step isnt even done most of the time tbh but it does make everything look nicer
i call each comic its own Arc so we plan them one at a time. theyre Largely disconnected from each other, time has passed between them but its easier to just bundle 5 or 6 1 or 2 page comics together. a lot of short vignettes all tied together by a location or character or plot
