Art Journal 001: The Sketch Phase (Patreon)

Over the years I've developed an evolving multi-step process to making comics that has proven very useful in organizing and producing my pages. In order the phases are 1) Thumbnails, 2) Sketches, 3) Inks, 4) Flats, 5) Tone Foregrounds, 6) Lettering & Word Balloons, 7) Paint Backgrounds. This week's weekly update landed on the Sketch phase so I'm going to talk a little about that. The sketch phase is probably the single most important phase of the entire comic. This is where I take my thumbnails (which I'll post in a second post after this one, I wanted to include them here but it looks like one image per update) and convert them into a working document- I'll also leave little notes when I want a particular tone for the speech in one panel so I can check up on it in the lettering phase- the text is rarely all written up beforehand, I prefer to organize panels so the action takes precedence. It's easier for me to fit the words around the doing, rather than fit the doing around the words. Oh, by the way: it's very important to leave enough space for the words to fit into later. I hate having to overlap my speech bubbles overtop of my characters- whether this is an obsessive compulsion on my part of a matter of not wanting to cover up the "good art" I can't say, it might be a little of both. But I always choose my words so they fit the spaces I leave them around the subjects. This is where I finalize things I can't easily change later, like panel flow, camera angles and position of characters within the frames. One of my oil painting professors used to say, "good drawing can save a bad painting, but good painting can't save a bad drawing." This is the framework of the whole piece, and if I don't give myself the information I need to work then I'll be filling in gaps on the fly and doing a lot of guesswork, and whenever I try to "cheat" on my sketches I always regret it. One element I leave pretty basic in my sketches is the background. In every panel of every page of my comic I like to include some sort of background, with the exception of the occasional dramatic shock panel, because I feel like a good environment is a character all itself, and comics where that character isn't present always take me out of the story. The characters are always "in" the world, so I always draw the world, but I don't really -sketch- the world beforehand. I used to go to pains to draw backgrounds but I found that my subjects were getting lost in them visually, since they were at equal detail, so what I started doing was I block in my camera angles and I'll free-paint the backgrounds. By not inking the backgrounds and doing them with broader shapes and no stark outlines I can give my characters a visual *pop* outside of whatever's behind them, so they're planned for but not overly prepared before I get to them. Anyways here is my page sketch! I'm going to do a second post with the thumbnails attached because I wanted to show how much planning in thumbnails I do and how much changes from plot to page. This is my first Patreon content post so I hope the formatting allows for all these words. Thanks for your support! I'll have another write-up next week.