Process of a comic page in Woolly Wonderful

People who are not familiar with the artistic process might perceive the creation of art I as some sort of magical act. That we artists just make some confident marks from our imagination and *bam* the masterpiece is done. And even for me, now that I have finished issue 1 of my comic, it seems unbelievably far away and odd when I laid down my first sketches.

That notion might even be strengthened when watching artists like Kim Jung Gi who created huge masterworks in ink, straight from their mind onto paper. Of course they are not magicians, even if it seems so. They just trained long enough. They have drawn many subjects over and over again until they don’t need references or guiding lines any more.

Rough pencils. Woolly sitting in the Dad room reading.

Before getting to any pencil work on a comic page it is important to have a rough layout of each page. That way you can envision the panel flow and how your story turns out visually. Think of it as storyboarding a movie. You don’t need to get perspective right in this stage, especially if you move panels around or even delete them.

In the above example I replaced the last panel as you will see in the next page samples. The initial idea would just have burdened me with another detailed interior shot, where instead I could show more of the outside of the house and show how electricity is created for it.

The next phase is the foundation of your page. You design and draw all your subjects. You will use perspective lines, references, your skill and your imagination to fill your page. I have done this in red with a pencil brush to make the lines stand out when inking later.

You can use as much iterations as needed, nobody tells you to do it right the first time. Depending on your style you can lay done super clean pencils or keep it loose like I did. You don’t even have to ink it anymore, it is up to you and your liking.

Note: professional comic writers and artists (not me) have their dialogue ready before drawing, so they can draw in the speech bubbles and design the page including them. Next time I’ll do better.

Next phase in my process is the inking phase. This is where I lay down definite and clean lines, and define form and cast shadows. Varying line thickness helps to keep the line work interesting and define shadows. Look at Woolly and his hair, or him and the book in the upper panels.

Final page without dialogue.

Second last (before lettering) is the colouring step. Just slap a bit colour on it. Done! No, it’s not that easy. There is an almost endless list of styles you could apply and within them different passes including flattening, shadow and light passes, textures, effects and colour adjustments. That’s a topic for another post.

So when you are a beginner artist, don’t be discouraged. Getting to your masterpiece requires a few rounds on the same subject, every round closer to the end result. The joy in the end comes from seeing what you made when there was nothing before, and the enlightenment when you go back and look at the initial scribbles from phase one. And realise how far you’ve come.

Stay curious,

Andi Pasti