Page layouts

The page thumbnails are coming at a steady pace - I'm marking their progress in the list on the right - and I'm really enjoying this job! These tiny sketches probably don't make any sense to anyone but me, and they look terrible, but they're really helpful. I hardly include any visual ideas for pages or panels when I'm writing a script, so this step in the process forces me to create an actual comic out of a big pile of words.

I'm well on my way to finishing these by the end of the month. Only eight more days before I can start pencilling actual pages... Yay!

Page distribution

OK... time to start planning this book. I've gone over the script and broken it down into individual pages. Which is not exactly rocket science: it's more like a rough estimate of how much information will fit on a single page. I'm trying to build up a nice flow / rhythm throughout the whole book. And scribbling lots of brackets in the margins of the script, as you can see.

I've decided to make it an A5-sized book, out of folded A4 sheets. That'll save me the paper cutting I had to do for my previous book. Including the title pages, the counter has come to a stop at 168 pages. That's a LOT of work... but doable... I guess... And they can can be split up in 14 sets of 3 A4 sheets for the folding and binding. Neat!

Still not sure if it's best to start pencilling right away (I want to!) or to make miniature sketches & page layouts for the whole book first. I could try to do both things simultaneously. Sketch thumbnails in the mornings & afternoons while I'm on the bus, and draw pages on the evenings & weekends. The best ideas tend to pop up while I'm zoning out onboard public transport anyway :)

Research: props

Including the sparrow skull :)

Research: locations

Research is addictive! I must have collected over a hundred images in the past week, and now I have told myself to STOP. This comic also needs to be drawn, remember?

More Anne

 

My brush pen and I had a bit of an argument while we were inking this one. Splitting hairs and such.