"Chernobýl" 61-62-63 (Patreon)

I really wanted to talk about a page of this comic as a whole at some point, so here we go!

First things first - I gotta admit ( and I've probably already did before!) - first chapter of this story was basically improvised and figured out as it went, webcomic-style. I was just drawing tons of panel sketches on special little cards and then using some of the cards to construct the story flow, moving cards around, grouping them into 3 panels strips and then 3 strips pages. The dialogues were accidental and quite simplistic, and everything revolved about 2 central plot point/"splash" pages.

But for the second chapter, everything was different. In my head it was drenched in dialogues, important and not, drowning in details I wanted to fit into narrative and more subtle emotional bits I wanted to play out. On top of that, I decided that this chapter will (possibly) jump across 3 different timelines, so the improvisational approach would probably get me into too much troubles.  

And thus, here's basic pipeline for second chapter of "Chernobýl":

1) this time around I have my main text breakdown of events and chronology of bigger chunk of the story, and it's written down in form of rough preliminary dialogues and situation descriptions.

2) I also have a bunch of sketches of different poses, interactions and emotes for my characters. I've been operating in this mode for a while even in my mainline work - sketching a ton of abstract and more story-related things before going into any actual pages.

3) Looking at the """script""", I'm trying to figure out actual page-to-page flow of the story:

4) now, from this point I could go to the usual sketch card approach, but for the last few months I felt almost repulsed with my moleskine, and so instead I've been doing 80% of  Chernobýl digitally, inking included. So rather than mess around with sketch cards, I do actual f u l l  p a g e   p e n c i l s ! But since I do have a bunch of pre-existing sketches, the process still more resembles playing with Legos.

(between here and the tiny layouts I decided to move one of the next strips to the middle of this page - and this strip was actually already finished).

5) Placing rough dialogues on page while working on art:

 (at this stage I'm cutting big chunks out of dialogues from my initial """script""" or adding some little things in it to make it all flow well).

6) Then I'm turning a page in to Yuriy for English translation. Even if the text is not finalized in Russian, we're good - a lot of stuff gets adapted to English in a more creative way and we discuss it all a lot. Maybe one day I should ask Yuriy to write a little article about his take on the work "тонкобздюх" and other perils of working with me!

7) And that's it. Inking and tones are pretty much my usual. Panel 5 on this page is my main reason to go digital because I wasn't ready to do all the pointillé with hand.

Getting into some tricky stuff on next pages. Hopefully, will be back in a week, but who knows!