#maquette

Claude Lalanne,

Maquette for the Central Park Zoo Gates, New York, circa 1982,

Patinated bronze, galvanized copper,

9 7⁄8 x 10 5⁄8 x 1 ¾ in. (25 x 27 x 4.5 cm) (unframed), 14 ½ x 15 x 2 ¾ in. (37.4 x 38.1 x 7 cm) (framed).

A giant kid indicates his readiness to fight Godzilla!

This was Godzilla as he was going to appear in the original American film in the mid-1990s, as directed by Jan de Bont, before Sony/Tri-Star pulled the plug supposedly because the budget was too high.

I LOVE THIS QUESTION. MORE PHYSICAL MEDIA.

I'll preface this by saying that a lot of my work is done with a hybrid approach. Comics at scale require efficiency, and there are some things that digital is way better for! I love penciling and inking on paper, but layouts do benefit a great deal from digital tools like being able to quickly copy/paste, transform, and trace elements.

That being said, I am a Paper Bitch at heart, so here's some advice for working analog:

For figuring out layouts: keep a pad of paper near your workspace—the shittier the better. Hell, if you can smooth out and keep the packing paper from anything you've ever ordered off the internet? Works great. Something that doesn't feel precious.

If you've ever watched a timelapse video of an artist sketching out a composition digitally, you can see that people are trying and deleting lines constantly. Digital art makes it easier to erase that paper trail, but we're all still going through the phase of thinking "Maybe like this? No, no that's not right. Maybe this??" You want to make is really easy to do that iteration on paper. We learn by making marks.

This is what that looks like for me:

These are mostly single panels that I'm troubleshooting, but the idea is to draw small and sloppy when you're figuring out your thumbnails. A lot of folks (myself included) like to include word balloons at this stage to make sure there's room for them in the composition.

These aren't "good" drawings, they're working drawings. I do them in pen because I want to encourage myself to just try again if something doesn't feel right, rather than erasing and perfecting a single tiny thumbnail.

As far as reusing assets: try sculpting reference! I have literally used Babybel cheese wax for this in the past. You don't have to get fancy Monster Clay (though you can! the models below are all done with one of their sampler packs, which are fine if you don't need a lot of it):

This was for a sequence where a character is leaping through the air and I wasn't confident drawing it straight from the noggin. AgainL not perfect sculpts, just working little guys for figuring out proportion. Here's the pencils:

And the final inks:

You can also trace things if you've got an exact copy of an image that needs to go elsewhere. If you don't have a light box, you can just hold your two bits of paper up against a sunny window or layer them on top a bright digital screen.

Very often if I'm inking on paper, but know something needs to be fixed once everything gets digitized, I'll leave a note for myself in the margins in non-repro blue. This helps save time so I'm not staring at every page when I scan it trying to remember if anything was horribly wrong.

À bientôt...