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Making Comics

Making Comics: Emotion and pacing in comics

One of the reasons that I love comics so much is that there are many valid ways to approach the medium. When I make comics, the parts I’m most concerned with are character and story. Everything I draw on the comic page is in service to character and story. Because of my focus on those two elements over, say, experimenting with my art and page structure, I will sometimes get criticism that my work is safe or boring. This is probably fair criticism! I don’t do a lot of experimenting with paneling or challenging storytelling or explicitly challenging artwork in my comics, because right now that’s not what I’m interested in. Maybe I will be more experimental someday, but not right now, with the kind of stories I want to tell. 🙂

When I make a comic, my goal is for my readers to be engaged with the story I’m telling, and the characters in that story. That’s also what I look for when I want to read a good comic. I want characters to love, I want a story to be engaged with.

For the most part, I struggle with drawing comics (most artists do, if we’re honest ;)), but there are some parts of comics I think I have a good handle on. I feel like I’m strongest when portraying emotion on the page, and I’m good at drawing those scenes out and making the reader feel what my characters are going through. Some of the techniques I use to convey emotion came from being obsessed with movies when I was a teenager, and some techniques are stolen from my holy trinity of influences: Jeff Smith (Bone), Hiromu Arakawa (Fullmetal Alchemist) and Naoki Urasawa (Monster, Pluto, 20th Century Boys).

Of the three artists I’ve mentioned, I consider Urasawa especially to be a master of emotion and pacing. When I first started reading his comics, it was like light struck my brain; finally I saw what I’d been trying to do for years right there on the comic page in front of me! I like the way he lays out his emotional scenes a lot. Here’s an example (read right to left):

Faith Erin Hicks presents Urasawa example of emotion and pacing

Urasawa uses repeating panels and decompression to draw out the emotions of a scene. In this single page there isn’t a lot of movement. It’s literally just two characters staring at each other, but the tension rises going from panel 1 to panel five. Gesicht (the man)’s expression doesn’t change between panels two and five, but we literally feel his anger rising off-panel, concluding in the close up in panel 5.

There’s an excellent You Tube channel called Every Frame a Painting (I’m sure you’ve heard of it, but if you haven’t, please go watch all the videos! There aren’t many, and they’re all really informative). My favourite video is this one, about editing:

This video hit on something that I strive for in my comics: emotion takes time. When I draw a scene that is emotional, when characters are struggling with something, or celebrating something, or being challenged, I want my readers to feel what the character is feeling, and one of the best ways to do that, for me, is to take my time. To give that emotion time to breathe on the page.

I’m going to use some scenes in my graphic novel The Nameless City to illustrate how I use decompression and pacing to underscore the emotion in my comics. To avoid spoilers and because this is getting a little long, I’m going to put it under a cut. Please read on! 🙂

Hello again! In The Nameless City, one of the main characters, Rat, lives in a monastery, because she’s an orphan. She seems to have a good relationship with one of the monks in particular, Joah. When we first see them together, they act like this:

Faith Erin Hicks presents Rat and Joah from The Nameless City

Up until this point in the story, Rat hasn’t been particularly nice or affectionate to anyone, but it’s different with Joah. And it’s hopefully obvious from these two panels that he’s fond of her too. Rat and Joah don’t have a lot of scenes together throughout the course of the book, so I use their body language to immediately establish their bond. Rat is very different with Joah than she is with Kai, who she’s either been mean to or openly mocked for most of their interactions.

There are a couple more scenes where Joah and Rat interact, and in those scenes I visually drive home their relationship. Rat is more of a kid around him, bouncing on her toes, asking if there’s anything to eat:

Faith Erin Hicks shows example of how Joah and Rat interact in The Nameless City

… and Joah’s kind of a dick to Kai at first, which Rat thinks is hilarious:

Faith Erin Hicks shows example of how Joah and Rat interact in The Nameless City

So basically we have a fairly straightforward Surrogate Dad & Daughter relationship. Rat’s parents are dead, and she comments that the monks are “nice,” but we don’t really see her interacting with anyone but Joah. He’s her connection to the monastery and the monks, and a tiny bit of parental oversight in her unsupervised life. Until he goes too far, and really tried to parent her, and Rat loses her shit:

Faith Erin Hicks shows Rat of The Nameless City showing great emotion

Oops.

Anyway, this very long set up finally brings us to this scene, which is where I get to unleash my love of decompression and silent emotional beats.

Faith Erin Hicks shows more examples of emotion and pacing from The Nameless City

(Above is page 136 and below is page 137 in The Nameless City. Just wanted to be clear where the pages begin & end!)

Faith Erin Hicks shows more examples of emotion and pacing from The Nameless City

The story beats on these two pages are quite slow, and I spend two pages on a part of the story where it might be more efficient to use only one or two panels. There are many kinds of scenes where it is appropriate to speed things along more quickly (for example, a fight scene, or a scene where characters are doing something quickly), but for this particular scene, I wanted the fallout from Rat’s emotional outburst to be made very clear. Kai gets three silent panels at the beginning of page 136 to walk back to his home and stare out the window, thinking about his role in the fight, and Rat and Joah get a page and a half to deal (poorly) with their relationship.

The paneling of page 137 is particularly important. Comic paneling has kind of a rhythm to it, and in my own dumb shorthand, I think of widescreen panels (panels that reach horizontally across the length of the comic page) as “boom” panels. I know, it’s silly! But generally speaking, readers tend to spend more time looking at large panels, so they “read” as more important than smaller ones. Large panels slow the reader’s eye down. They’re basically like the cartoonist is saying “hey! There’s something extra important happening in this panel! Or here’s an establishing shot I spent six hours drawing!” The first and fourth panel of page 137 is me, the cartoonist, jumping in and being like “BOOM! pay attention to this emotional stuff! BOOM!” XD But here’s the tricky thing: overusing large panels can lessen their importance, which is why comics that only use full-page-width “widescreen panels” can look stagnant. It’s a complex balance.

My hope is that my readers will feel the emotional complexity of the relationship between these two characters on page 137. Through the paneling, through Rat’s body language, and through Joah’s body language. Up until this point, Rat and Joah seem to have a good relationship. He looks after her a little bit, and she seems very fond of him. Until she very pointedly reminded him that he’s not actually her parents and probably has no business telling her what to do. So at the start of page 137, Rat is trying to apologize, to make things as they were. But Joah just turns away from her and goes back to his gardening, leaving Rat standing beside him, starting to cry. The scene ends on this page, and we don’t see what happens afterwards. There is repetition in the wide “boom” panels at the top and bottom of the page, and the only dialogue spoken is Joah saying “thank you” in panel two.

Emotion takes time! If I had been super efficient with these pages and wrapped everything up in a couple of panels, I feel like this scene would have less impact. Hopefully when a reader looks at this page, they’ll feel something for these characters and their struggles. That is my goal with every graphic novel I create, to make you feel something. 🙂

Anyway! These are my thoughts on decompression, paneling and emotion in my comics. I hope you enjoyed them. 🙂

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Making Comics

Comic Career Paths: Creator Owned Vs. Work for Hire? What is Right for You?

Covers of Faith Erin Hicks publications

I did a pretty extensive interview with David Harper of the comics site SKTCHD, which has done some pretty great writing about the comics industry lately. The article I was interviewed for is this one: The American Dream: How Telling Your Own Stories Became the Endgame for Creators. It’s a good article with quotes from great creators like Kurt Busiek, Cliff Chiang, Marcos Martin, Emma Rios, Jake Wyatt and Skottie Young. The article only used about 10% of the interview I did with Harper, so with his permission I’m posting the rest of it here. Click below the link to read me rambling on about creator owned vs. work for hire, and the upside and downside to both. As always, my comments are based on my own experiences as someone who has made both creator owned and work for hire comics, and may not apply to your specific situation. 🙂

>>Before you started your career in comics – back when you were in pure aspirational mode – did you have an end goal of what you wanted to do or a vision as to what success looked like to you? If so, how has that shifted over your career?

All I wanted was to make a living wage doing some kind of creative work. That’s it, really. And I had no idea what that looked like. I didn’t even know what being a cartoonist was. When I was a teenager through college I didn’t think comics was ever something I could get paid to do, so I wanted to work in animation instead. Working in animation seemed like a realistic career to me; there were books written about animators and you could go to school for animation. Comics seemed like a weird pie in the sky career, something very few people got to do for a living. I don’t think I really started learning about what cartoonists do and how they make their living until I started getting published! It was weird. But really, all I wanted was to make enough money to live, pay my rent, own a car, that kind of thing. Very vague goals.

I don’t think much has changed in terms of my goals. I still want the same thing, to make a living wage off my writing and drawing, but I guess my goals have become more specific. I want the books I write and draw to sell well, I want them to be critically acclaimed, I want my art heroes to notice my work, I want to work on specific projects. I’d also like to make more money, but I hope that will come, as long as I continue to do good work. I’ve been really lucky: I’ve achieved a lot of my goals, even crazy ones like winning an Eisner.

>>Besides a few things that were for-hire gigs or pitches, you’ve spent your whole career telling your own stories. As a cartoonist who has been at this for a bit, what are the plusses and minuses of going that route?

To be honest, it wasn’t really a route I planned to take, I just ended up taking it because that was the work that was offered to me. If I had been offered work for hire gigs back when I first started getting published (2007), I definitely would have taken them. Work for hire pays well, and I was very poor back then. But my artwork and writing wasn’t polished enough to attract the attention of those publishers. However, now that I have a number of books published, I’ve gotten some wonderful, tempting offers from publishers like Dark Horse, DC, IDW, Marvel and Boom. Due to my drawing schedule and commitment to my current project (a middle grade graphic novel trilogy I’m doing with First Second Books called The Nameless City), I’ve had to turn most of them down, which is terrifying. I hope the work will still be there if I need it in the future. I have the freelancer’s fear of turning down work.

In 2013 I co-wrote and drew a video game prequel comic, The Last of Us: American Dreams. It paid more money than I’d ever been paid before, and allowed me to become a lot more financially secure. So that’s the big plus of doing work for hire: it really pays well!

However, for me, especially now that I’m more financially stable, I really want to work on my own stories. I’m in the middle of drawing the second Nameless City book, and it’s incredibly satisfying to me. I love creating my own worlds and characters and getting very involved with them. It’s so much fun. It’s a little scary to turn down well paying work on licensed comics to work on your own projects, especially when you don’t know how readers will respond to your original work, but I just have to trust that it will be worth it down the road. I don’t know, I just have an itch to make my own stories. Some people don’t have that itch. Working on other people’s stories is satisfying to them, and that’s great. But it’s different for me. There are very few properties that I love more than I love working on my own stories.

The question that I get asked a lot is “if you could work on anything, any comic book property, what would it be?” And honestly, at this point in time, I think I’d rather make my own stories. As long as I’m making a living wage, that is. 😉 I’m fortunate that publishers have paid me for my original work. I know it’s not always like that.

>>Once upon a time, releasing your own work via smaller publishers or even self-publishing seemed like a greater focus for newer creators with established creators dominating at Marvel and DC. These days, established creators seem to be shifting their focus to creator-owned and creating their own graphic novels. Why do you think that is?

I can only guess based on my own experiences. For me, when I make a creator owned comic, something that I created from the ground up, all of it is me. I’m not working with someone else’s characters or beholden to someone else’s canon, I’m the god of my own world. And every hour I put into that comic is my hour. I’m investing in my creativity. That sounds super bombastic, but that’s how I feel sometimes. It’s like, this comic is all mine, for good or ill. If it’s great and people love it, that’s for me. If it’s terrible, that’s on me.

Also, we seem to finally be in a place where it can be profitable to make your own comics, outside of the Big Two. My career has flourished through publishing with the graphic novel imprint of a book publisher. Other writers and artists find their niche at Image. And we can actually make a living writing and drawing our books. So that’s important.

>>Back when I was growing up, there wasn’t anything I wanted more than to draw the X-Men. Sadly, I had no talent. However, other creators I’ve spoken to had the same dreams, and they ended up either doing that or touching that world in their own way. These days though, it seems like younger readers are growing up on things like Raina Telgemeier and The Adventures of Superhero Girl and teens are reading things like Saga and Lumberjanes rather than superhero books. Do you think the next generation of comic creators growing up on different types of comics will lead to a shift in future creator sensibilities and priorities, and a greater focus on telling your own stories rather than someone else’s?

Maybe. I guess it depends on the kid reading the comic, doesn’t it? And the kind of comics the kid is reading. I meet a lot more kids who read Raina’s comics than I do kids who read Spider-man. I think Marvel and DC have done themselves a real disservice by deciding not to cater to kid readers. Every kid knows who Spider-man is, but do they read Spider-man comics? No, they read Raina’s comics, because her comics are made for them, and easily accessible through libraries, schools and bookstores.

>>It seems to me that the options for budding cartoonists or writers or artists to get comics in front of readers are more diverse and expansive than ever. What do you think having such a variety of options means for the future of comics, and for those aspiring to make them?

I think it’s pretty great, to be honest. I remember being desperate to read comics when I was a teenager and there was nothing for me. Like, just nothing. Now there are dozens of comics that I would’ve loved to read when I was 15, and more importantly, they’re pretty easy to find. Comics are carried in bookstores now, they’re in libraries, they’re in schools. Comics will always have an access problem, I think, but it’s gotten a lot better. Kids will be able to find the kind of comics they want to read, and maybe they’ll keep reading and fall in love with the art form and want to make their own comics. I’m really excited to see what comics will become in the next twenty years. I hope that we’ll continue to see a blossoming of diversity of voices in comics. I think we will. I don’t know what will happen to the world of corporate comics, but I think there will still be a place for them. I don’t think the Wednesday crowd will go away. The future of comics seems really bright at this moment in time. Selfishly, I hope it will include a spot for me. 🙂

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Making Comics

Making Comics: A day in the life …

freeglassart asked: Hello! I’ve wanted to ask… you draw a lot! Like, a lot a lot. You’re super productive (by my standards) and its all great quality stuff. Now I’ve asked a couple of people about this but I’d really appreciate getting an answer from you… Do you ever get the feeling of being tired of drawing as a whole? Like “ugh I REALLY HAVE TO finish this but I just– I just don’t want to!” And if so… How do you deal with that feeling? Many thanks!

So this is pretty much my work day:

Faith Erin Hicks draws herself working on a typical day, part 1

Faith Erin Hicks draws herself working on a typical day, part 2

Faith Erin Hicks draws herself working on a typical day, part 3

Yes, some days I really do work those kind of hours. Most days I try my best not to, but when crunch time happens and I have a deadline looming, the hours get really long. And here’s the unfortunate reality of being a professional artist: you will absolutely have moments when you are sick of drawing, when you can’t stand the idea of putting another line down on your Cintiq (or paper, or whatever), where you feel like all inspiration has been squeezed out of you and …. well, those deadlines are still looming, so you just have to keep drawing. You gotta be a pro, you gotta get your stuff drawn.

Drawing comics is my favourite thing in the world. It is my dream job. I don’t think I will ever want to do anything else, but I still have days when drawing is a drudgery. I once heard drawing comics compared to “being force fed your favourite food every day,” and I totally get that. After I’m finished drawing a graphic novel, I usually don’t want to draw at all for a few weeks after.

Burnout is definitely a thing in comics. I recommend having some hobbies that aren’t related to drawing or comics in order to combat it. I like reading, jogging and playing video games. Going out and seeing people is also super important. Anything that gives you a break from the drawing desk.

But … sometimes, the deadlines are just too tight. You don’t have time for a break. You just have to keep going. If you’re lucky enough to draw comics for a living, you should absolutely treat it as a job and try your very hardest to make your deadlines. During the final push to get Nameless City book 1 drawn, I had 3 days off over a 3 month period. I hope I’ll never have to do that again, but that was just what happened this year. I took a week off after the book was done. I slept a lot. Played Resident Evil: Revelations. Didn’t draw at all. It was nice. 🙂 I absolutely believe in keeping a work/life balance, but … well, sometimes you just gotta give up on life for a few months in order to make a deadline. And then you schedule your coming year so that you won’t have to go through that again. 🙂

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Making Comics

Making Comics: A peek into how I write comics!

nirwastir asked: Hi Faith! I saw what you wrote on hours spent on writing vs. drawing comics and I realized I’ve never actually seen a comic book script before. Does it look like a movie script? Could you tell us a bit about what scripting a comic is like?

I started writing the script for Nameless City book 2 this week, so I am totally prepared to talk about this!

DISCLAIMER! I’m going to give you a peek into how I write comics. This is a method that works for me, but it may not work for you. You don’t have to write this particular way, this is just how I do it. I’m friends with many people who work in the comic book industry and what I’ve discovered by talking to them about process is that we all make comics differently.

So, this is me, working away on the script for Nameless City book 2 this week:

Making comics with Faith Erin Hicks - working on Nameless City script

(Your bowls, kitchen table and beverage choice may vary.) The typed pages on the right are my outline. For me, an outline is important. It’s how I keep track of what needs to happen in the story. Mine tend to also have emotional beats (Kai is feeling angry because [reason], Rat is hungry because she’s always hungry) and some important dialogue thrown in. On the left is a spiral notebook purchased from a drugstore. That’s where I draw my rough draft of the book. When making my first draft of a graphic novel, I thumbnail and write dialogue by hand beside the thumbnails.

Why? Because this allows me to think about the artwork and pacing of the comic while writing dialogue. Comics are both art and writing (one does not take precedence before the other), and this thumbnail-and-script method allows me to keep the balance of both at the beginning.

When I’m done my very rough thumbnail draft, I end up with something that looks like this:

Making comics with Faith Erin Hicks - rough thumbnail draft of work

lol! That’s the first draft of The Nameless City book 1. All the loose paper is scenes I’ve added or altered, and I wasn’t able to fit them into the spiral notebook. If I was smart, I’d do these early drafts on loose paper or notebooks that allow you to add and remove pages, but I dunno, I just like these cheap spiral notebooks for some reason. XD

Then, when I’m satisfied with this early draft of the comic, I go and type the whole sucker up. It looks approximately like this:

Making comics with Faith Erin Hicks - typing up script

So here’s where we get into the whole thing of “I am both the writer and artist of this comic, so I work a little differently than if I was just the writer.” As both the writer and artist, I have a mental picture of what will be going on in each scene in my head (I’ve also done those thumbnails). So I’m not very detailed when describing what’s going on in each panel. I tend to include only basic, important information in addition to the dialogue, so my editor can understand what’s going on.

In contrast, here’s a page from the script for Bigfoot Boy 3, a kids’ comic series I did with the writer J. Torres. J, by the way, is an experienced and skilled writer, and very good to work with. As an artist, I recommend him!

Making comics with Faith Erin Hicks - another script example

J is a LOT more detailed in his writing than I am, and there’s a reason for that: he’s not the artist of the comic, I am. And I can’t see into his head. So he has to effectively communicate what he wants drawn in each scene. That’s super important! J also formats his pages properly, which is something I can’t be bothered with if I’m writing for myself (my editor at First Second doesn’t seem to mind). I believe this is a format you can get from that writing program Final Draft (which I do not own but should probably buy at some point). I do all my writing in Open Office, a free program.

So that’s pretty much it, I think! I do a bit of revising when I type up my script, tightening the dialogue and just trying to give things a final polish, and then I hand it into my editor. She gets back to me with notes, we revise, and then I’m off to draw the sucker.

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Making Comics

How I make the comics

I’ve been asked a few times how my comic making process works now that I’ve switched to penciling digitally, so I’m going to do a write up about that. As always you can find all my blogging about making comics on this handy tumblr post.

So, previously I made comics completely traditionally. Here’s a write up of how I used to make comics. All of the pre-drawing of the comic still applies: I still do my thumbnails by hand, scribbled in a notebook.

Now I draw comics on a Cintiq, in Manga Studio. Here’s what my initial desktop looks like:

Faith Erin Hicks shows how her initial Manga Studio desktop looks

That’s Manga Studio, and my template comic page. It’s 10 by 14 inches, and the blue lines are my safety, trim and bleed. All important artwork and dialogue/speech bubbles should go within the safety.

Faith Erin Hicks starts sketching within the template safety

I draw with a red pencil (Pencil-Layout Red) from the Frenden Manga Studio brush pack. I can’t remember which pack I bought, but there’s only 3 on the Frenden site and I’m sure they’re all great. Frenden does great brushes. Why red? It’s just easier to see than blue. For some reason I have a hard time sketching with a blue pencil on a screen, although I still draw with blue on paper. I don’t know why that is.

Faith Erin Hicks starts drawing with a red pencil

And here’s a rough comic page! Ta da! It’s pretty messy. I used a lot of reference to draw Nameless City. This is page 97, so a right facing page in the published book. Therefore the bleed on the second panel is bleeding off of the page and not into the spine of the book.

Faith Erin Hicks presents a rough comic page

One of the best things about Manga Studio is its perspective tools. I’m not an expert in using them, so I recommend looking up someone who really knows what they’re doing if you want to know more. I mostly just use the 1 and 2 point perspective grids to figure out where the floor is in certain panels, so I can more easily place characters within space. Very basic stuff, but it has made my life so much easier. I would marry Manga Studio’s perspective grids if I could. 😀

Faith Erin Hicks works enthusiastically with Manga Studio perspective grids

Then I clean up the page a bit. Eventually I hope to eliminate this step, because it’s time consuming. All I do is adjust the colour of the pencils to blue and trace over the figures I feel need improving with red. I usually only do this with main characters, an attempt at keeping everyone consistently drawn (lol).

Faith Erin Hicks shows the page clean-up step

This is what it looks like with the rough pencils turned off. I never had to do this when I drew traditionally, and I think it’s because I’m not yet used to inking over digital pencils. People ask me about inking and how I “find the right line” to ink, and the answer is I just do. But for some reason I can’t with my printed out digital pencils. So until I become more accustomed to them, I need to do clean up. It sucks! Just an extra step I want to eleminate.

Faith Erin Hicks shows how it looks moved into Photoshop

Then I bring the file into Photoshop and prepare it for printing. The pencils always print darker than the look in PS, so I put down a layer of white overtop the pencils and adjust the layer’s opacity to 55%.

Faith Erin Hicks, getting ready to print

Here’s the paper I use for printing, same paper as I’ve always used: Strathmore Bristol, smooth surface. I cut down these 17 x 14 inch sheets to 17 x 12 so they’ll fit in my printer.

Faith Erin Hicks, making comics

My lovely printer! I do adore it. It’s an Epson Artisan 1430, the size of a keyboard and it’s been great. I printed out 200+ pages of blueline comic pages on only two cartridges of ink.

Faith Erin Hicks, making comics

It’s printing!!!

Faith Erin Hicks, making comics

And done! Now for inking.

Faith Erin Hicks, making comics

Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of this page when it was half-done, but here’s the finished product. I don’t ink my borders because I can’t draw a straight line, even with a ruler. 😀 Borders I do in Photoshop.

Faith Erin Hicks, making comics

I use a brush for inking. These are the brushes I use: Raphael Kolinsky watercolour brush, sizes 0, 1 & 2. I use the 1 for most of the page, the 0 for finer details and the 2 for larger areas. Anything that’s a straight line is inked with a pen. I tend to use Faber Castel pens, usually a small or extra small.

So that’s pretty much it! After I finish the page I scan it and prep it for printing in Photoshop, which is pretty boring.

The main question I get when I talk about my process is “Why don’t you ink digitally? Then you won’t have to scan.” I would very much like to eliminate scanning from my process, but at this point, I really love inking traditionally. It’s the part of the comic-making process that I enjoy the most, and I also think that traditional inks give my comics their unique look. I’m just not ready to take that step and ink digitally for my graphic novels, although I have done it for shorter comics. Maybe someday, but not now. 🙂 For now, this is how I work.

I hope everyone enjoyed the post, and feel free to shoot me any questions you might have.

Categories
Making Comics

Making Comics: Page size advice

reginamantle asked: hi Faith! I’m a big fan of your work, you have a great style and I love seeing the progress posts on The Nameless City. I had a question and I hope it’s okay to ask — at what size do you tend to draw your pages at, and do you have any advice or dos/don’ts when it comes to sizing? (i.e. should one always work at A3 size or can 8.5/11 work too, that sort of thing) thanks in advance, sorry if this is out of place!

Thanks very much! The Nameless City pages are 10 by 14 inches with bleed, which is 1.6 times the size of the book when it will be printed (First Second tends to publish at a standard size of 8.5 by 6 inches). The live area (where important things like speech bubbles should go) on the original pages is 4.875 by 7.5 inches, so they aren’t super big, but big enough. I’m comfortable working at this size. I drew Friends with Boys and Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong at this size too.

I think whatever size you draw at that is comfortable for you is probably correct, and you needn’t worry about what the “correct” size for drawing comic pages is. I’ve drawn comics at a lot of different sizes. When I did my old webcomics Demonology 101 and Ice, I drew on 8 by 11 inch printer paper. When I drew The Last of Us: American Dreams, Dark Horse sent me Official Comic Paper, which was much bigger than I normally draw, about 11 by 17 inches with (I think) a live area of 10 by 15.

One suggestion, though: I would recommend drawing as small as you can, because that encourages speed. Drawing The Last of Us on huge sheets of paper really slowed me down, because I felt like I should fill every inch of the paper with detail. When I draw smaller, I focus more on what’s really important in the panel (the characters, the composition, the emotion), instead of tiny details that *seem* important when you’re drawing on a giant page, but then aren’t so important once the page is shrunk down and printed. …. soooooo many late nights on that Last of Us comic, drawing bricks, so many bricks, filling the background with bricks, aaaahh. XD

Categories
Making Comics

Making Comics: Finding your ideal drawing pace

The following is a post I’ve moved over from my Everything is Comics tumblr, which is still online but not actively maintained. Please note the date on the post. Because it is from a few years ago, not all links are up-to-date and not all commentary and details are 100% current. The post is provided as is, for background and general interest. For the latest information, please go to my About, Books and Making Comics sections.


misterloki asked: Typically, how many pages are you able to draw in a good week? I know every artist is different, though! I am trying to gauge an appropriate number I should shoot for, while still giving myself appropriate breaks for sanity’s sake. Thank you for taking your time to look at my question!

Well, I draw comics full time, so my answer will probably not be feasible for most people who maybe have regular jobs/school. I work about 12 hours a day (with a break for supper), six days a week (I take Saturday off) and my quota is 2 pages a day for pencils, 3 pages a day for inks. It varies with each project, though. That’s my quota for The Nameless City, and it’s a hard one to keep up. I usually need most of my 12 hours.

So if I’m on a penciling week, I’m drawing at least 11 pages a week (sometimes I slack a bit on Sundays, unfortunately). If I’m on an inking week, I’m inking about 16-18 pages.

This schedule is kind of hard, though. I’m really behind on my book right now, so I’m pushing myself to catch up. If you can make your deadlines while taking evenings and weekends off, I think that would be ideal.

When I was in school and doing online comics, I’d do maybe 4+ pages a week, which is still a really high number. The pages I drew back then were much smaller than the size I draw at now, and had less backgrounds. I could churn them out a lot faster. Over the five years I was in school full time and drawing online comics, I drew over 750 pages, which is nuts! I didn’t go out much. Also I was single. 😉

I think if you’re doing an online comic and maybe working a job or going to school, doing 10 pages a month is fantastic. That’s a really good pace, because then you’re drawing 120 pages over the course of a year! That’s an entire graphic novel. Even 5 pages a month will give you 60 pages in a year. It really adds up.

I’d suggest working at the speed you feel comfortable with, but always looking for ways to streamline or improve your process. As you become more accustomed to making comics, you’ll get faster and hopefully your work will become more accomplished. However, I am sad to report that despite drawing over 3,000 pages of comics, I still don’t find them easy to make. 😉 I’m always struggling to do better.

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Making Comics

Making Comics: Comics aren’t just art or just writing …

amanofletters asked: When you first got into comics, did you feel like you were better at, or more interested in, the drawing or the writing? I want to make my own comics, but I feel like my art straggles behind my writing. How can I cause these two aspects of comic-making to come together within myself, and make the works I want to make?

Oh hey, this is something I think a lot about, actually! So when I started making comics (15 years ago this month, haha), I was really terrible at drawing. And I wanted to do, y’know, GRAPHIC NOVELS, with fairly realistically drawn characters and backgrounds and things that are hard to draw. Things that I didn’t really have the skills to draw at the time. So I’d draw my comics and the art was generally pretty terrible. But I was comfortable with writing, and that helped me keep going with making comics, because I enjoyed the storytelling aspect of them so much.

It’s hard when you feel pretty okay about your writing but your art doesn’t measure up. I kind of feel like my art still doesn’t measure up to what I want it to be (mostly right now I want it to be Hiromu Arakawa, which will never happen, no matter how much I practice), but I’m very comfortable with the writing part of comics, so I look at that as my great strength in my work. It makes up for where my art is lacking, and I work hard at writing to make the sum total of my work better than if I was just writing or just drawing.

I mean, the absolute best thing about comics (to me) is that you don’t need to be a spectacular artist to make really great, involving comics. I’m not an amazing technical artist. During my down times, I don’t draw gorgeous illustrations or do amazing paintings (I kind of dislike doing that kind of thing, to be honest). I will never be Gillian Tamaki. But I’m good at storytelling, and I’m good at interpreting emotion and drawing that on the comic page. So I work to my strengths, which is making stories about engaging characters, and laying out scenes where there is a lot of emotion running through them, and people who like my comics don’t seem to mind that my art is not as great as Gillian Tamaki or Hiromu Arakawa.

Comics aren’t just art or just writing, they’re the two combined to make something new and wonderful. They are more than the sum of their parts. So work hard to because a decent artist with a good grasp of storytelling basics (this is super important!), and work harder to become a truly excellent writer and storyteller, and you can quite possibly make great comics! It worked for me. 🙂

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Making Comics

Making Comics: Applying for grants

draw-blog asked: Hi there, I’m a Canadian cartoonist interested in applying for some grants to make comics. I’ve heard that you have received some grants (apart from the now discontinued Xeric) to make comics and I was wondering if you could specify which ones, or talk a little bit about the process? Thanks a whole bunch!

The Canadian government has several grant programs to support the arts within Canada. I’ve gotten grants to make comics at both the provincial and federal level. These allowed me to continue working full time in comics during a very shaky financial period in my life.

The federal grant program in Canada is overseen by the Canada Council for the Arts. They support a variety of work from dance to sculpture to prose to comics. I’m actually not sure of all of the varieties they support, but it’s quite a lot. The grant for Creative Writing includes graphic novels, so if you are a cartoonist, you can apply for a grant to work on a comic. However, there are eligibility criteria to fulfill, so make sure you read that carefully to find out if your work is actually eligible for a grant.

The provincial grant programs vary from province to province. I got one from the Nova Scotia Communities, Cultures & Heritage grant program, to write and draw Friends with Boys. I would suggest googling to see what kind of grants are available to you in your province. I tend to suspect that there are less applicants on a provincial level; the Canada Arts Council is well know, and competition to get a grant is very strong at that level.

As for actually getting a grant, my advice is to make your application as strong as possible. If you are applying to do a graphic novel, include samples of that graphic novel, so the people on the grant jury can see your work and see what you want to achieve. Ask for the maximum amount of money available to your category, as you don’t get points for asking for less. Also, the grant jury changes every year, so if you fail to get a grant with a certain project, you can re-apply with that same project at a later date and it may be successful. But remember to make your application as strong as possible! You are pitching people on the merit of your work, and asking them to invest financially in it.

Good luck!!!!!!