Red Col-erase pencil and black roller-ball ink* over printed blue template.
Here's a peek at the process by which I create a comic book story.
This is a galley of thumbnails for each page layout. For these twelve pages of a Tuff-Girl adventure, I work out in a quick, little sketch things like breaking the page into ubiquitous panels (i.e. boxes), poses and word balloon placement.
For this story, I am working from a script that Merrill Hagan wrote. Merrill's script, like any script for a staged or filmed play, features dialogue and descriptions of the action to go into each panel. At the very least as the artist, I will make decisions about perspective and how to achieve the trick of focusing the reader's attention on things, all while leaving space for word balloons and narrative boxes. At the most, I will interpret the script in any way that I feel better tells the story.
The process so far, including writing the script and drawing these thumbnails, has taken about seven months.
Next, I have to pencil (i.e. draw with pencil, duh) and ink (i.e. draw over the pencil drawings with a brush and black ink, duh) the final art which will go into the book.
Ah, and then there's printing and marketing... i.e. how you get other people to read this.
*Uni-Ball® Vision fine point by Sanford.
