This is part 2 of a peek into my process for creating a page from my online graphic novel, Nathan Sorry. Warning: I am not an accomplished comic book artist so my way of doing things may not be something you should model your own process from.

2. Pencils

From the thumbnails I move quickly to the pencil stage.

I’m using Strathmore Bristol Smooth paper. 11×14 size with a drawing area of 8×12. I draw everything with a simple mechanical pencil.

I start pretty roughly, blocking out the entire page in what is akin to full size thumbnails. Then I keep going over the drawings, working out any anatomy and perspective problems that might come up. I may wind up drawing a panel over a couple of times until I get it right. I try to stay as loose as possible though. If I draw too tightly I may regret it when I finish and decide that something is not quite right. Then there is a lot of heavy pencil to erase and a lot of time lost. Plus I ink directly on top of my pencils so all of this has to get erased afterwards. Recently, I’ve been trying to decide where the line is between what should be worked out in the pencil stage and what can be accomplished in the ink stage. It’s all a matter of speeding up my process as much as possible but also keeping the process interesting for myself. Though at the same time, the less you have to think in the inking stage, the better.

This is actually one of the most complicated pages I’ve had to draw yet because each panel is a different scene in a different location. I don’t use reference too much for drawing people unless I get stuck trying to figure out a gesture or some piece of anatomy. Then I’ll usually take a quick and dirty picture of myself with either my iPhone or Photo Booth like the one shown here. Even here though, I don’t use too much of it for reference. In this case, I just needed to see how the arm rests and how the neck looks from this angle but I didn’t even use it that much for those things. In other cases I’ve used the reference more closely so this is probably just a bad example but it’s the only one I used for this page.

What I tend to need reference more for is figuring out details of certain objects or locations. In this case I pooled together some images from the web to help add certain details to the locations I was showing like a bank and a bar.

Another thing I use reference for is something a little harder to typify but I’ve been pooling together various photos or illustrations that have a certain feel to them which I think works for my story. I won’t really be using these in any specific way but they give me something to shoot for when I’m working on the book.

Anyway, it usually takes a couple of sittings to get the pencils to a point where I think they’re finished. Here is the final pencils for page 25 and as you can see they are still fairly rough. There’s a lot of room here for me to tighten things up but I’ll do that with the inks and hopefully not regret that I didn’t take the pencils further.