Process Blog Pt. 3: A ramble on drawing "The Gulf"

Hey folks,

Despite the records showing otherwise, I refuse to believe that the last time I posted a "Process Blog" regarding my graphic novel "The Gulf" was almost a year ago. I guess I've really just been that busy but it's hard to fathom the fact that I've been meaning to write about the next steps of working on my graphic novel for almost 12 months.

Geez.

Anyways, I wanted to continue to discuss the process of creating my first graphic novel, "The Gulf". Please feel free to ask questions. 

We left off with a broad overview of negotiating contracts and writing a script. Now, we find ourselves in the more ephemeral (but my favourite part of the process); drawing the damn book! This process can be broken into sections. 

It begins with the most ill-defined phase of "character design" and aesthetic explorations. This is an ongoing thing and can, at least for me, continue until the last the last moments before a deadline. Design is followed or concurrent to thumbnailing, roughing, and inking the book. Finally, there are edits which are usually boring and self explanatory. After the character design section, I'll be taking you through my process by following a single page throughout this process (and back again). 

Character Design

First, let's go back a bit to when I was first conceiving of "The Gulf" and take a look in my sketchbook. I got a perverse kick out of looking at my old sketchbooks and discovering how much the characters have changed since their inception. I was surprised to see that these earliest drawings have more of a rubbery cartoon energy to them than what they ended up with in the final book. It's hard to pin down what this is owed to specifically but I was also working on another pitch simultaneously aimed at a younger audience and was maybe leaning into that mode. In all honesty, at all times I feel torn between approaching my cartooning with a "traditional" approach (Tezuka or Schulz-y) and more "illustratorly" or "fine art" (Taiyo Matsumoto or Ben Shahn) so maybe it just depends on the phase of the moon. 

Anyways, here are some of the early sketches of the lead characters of "The Gulf". 

These are the types of drawings I am not inclined to share. They're not meant for anyone else; they're about establishing a feel or connection between the story in my head and an image, or character, on the page. These are quickly scrawled. The pages fill up quickly. Despite doing preliminary sketches, I have found a lot of the times a characters design emerges while drawing the story instead of during planning in the sketchbook. 

When designing a character I begin by doodling. Sometimes a design feels right instantaneously and I'll move forward after doing only a few drawings. I don't use model sheets or keep any sort of character design bible. This method has its pros and cons but I do feel like, practically, it means I have to accept I'll be doing laborious last minute edits to my inks in order to clarify a characters design. For example, the character of Milo (on the right in the above image) had his ears pierced, grew a mustache, and put on a vest between character sketches, thumbnails, roughs, inking, and editing the book. It also means you have to accept a certain amount of evolution throughout the process of drawing; the characters don't look 1:1 between the first chapter and the epilogue. I'm sure some cartoonists out there would balk at this method but I would find working from a desire to be "on model" would really kill the fun of drawing and learning about the characters in the process of telling the story through them. Cartooning, for me, is always about being expressive; for me personally as an artist within the act of drawing and for the characters.

Often, I do feel I should spend more time creating more dynamic shapes and contrasts between my character designs but, at the end of the day, all of my work is quite down to earth thematically and perhaps the more realistically proportioned characters suit my stories better. Maybe it'll never happen and my work will always exist on the edge between full blown throwback cartoon and something a bit more observed. I think overthinking the "look" of a book and its characters could cause me to emulate those I admire too much. 

Thumbnail's

This part of the process is maybe the most creatively free and invigorating. Because I was working from a "loose" script, it's the phase where the story becomes visual; composition, flow, pace, and feeling enter the frame. Thumbnailing is writing with gestures.

Thumbnails are tiny, quick, messy, and often indecipherable to return to. This phase is all about establishing the pace, composition, and overall flow of a book. It's where I get to make all of the "fun" decisions like, "you're going to draw a parking lot with a dozen cars" or, "do fish eye perspective in these panels" in the blink of an eye with no thought towards my well-being. More seriously, it's where you establish the pace of your book; what moments matter and how do you convey it - panel size? composition? repetition? etc. It's a free and intuitive process. It's writing with the most indecipherable images imaginable. 

I used to really care about "page flow" (guiding the eye between panels) when thumbnailing but I now kinda feel like its importance is often overstated. It feels like a knee-jerk criticism or observation that doesn't actually hold much meaning. It's a tool, like any other, in our creative tool belt. I believe it's not entirely necessary to "guide the eye" between panels because we know how to read a comic. Utilizing a dynamic and flowing composition is necessary when the moment calls for it but there's also a benefit in just considering the relationship between the panels and what is happening within the story itself; not every moment calls for bombast and flow. I think design elements like repetition, contrasts in sizes, tone, and just interesting drawing is more than enough to tell a story well in a comic.

Here are two examples of how a page of thumbnails looks in my sketchbook:

I wasn't kidding, eh? I often can't even read my own writing. With "The Gulf", I at least had a script I was referencing so I can decipher these but, on other projects, I find I can return to a thumbnailed page and discover I've completely forgotten half of the dialogue I've written. When that happens I rewrite or abandon it. I tend to find my best ideas are memorable to myself and anything forgotten is easily discarded. 

The pages will often be redrawn multiple times in this step. There's a lot of dialogue in my books and I always try to break it up over multiple pages while always having the characters doing something; acting, moving through a space, emoting..It's the phase where I kept reminding myself that it's easy to tell a "good story" poorly. 

So here's the example thumbnail we'll follow through the next steps:

look below for an explanation of what you're seeing.

Roughs

Roughing out the book varies from project to project. For "The Gulf", I scanned my thumbnails and drew over them digitally in Clip Studio. When working on "A Gleaming" or "Blind Alley", I find myself switching between roughing digitally and just doing it manually on paper. However, I find Clip Studios perspective rulers intuitive and are such an incredible time saver that I prefer to rough digitally for a project like this.

In this phase, the gesture of a comics page solidifies; all of the important ideas that are present in the scrawl of the thumbnails are put into action. I reference the thumbnail and sometimes trace over it if I liked the feel of the drawing. 

As far as roughs go, this above page is relatively "clean" for me. I often leave my characters quite gestural as I want inking to feel like drawing and not like tracing. I want the technical parts of the page to be solid before I move onto inking; perspective, layout, and acting.  I don't always plan out everything perspective-wise like in the above page. I often, maybe naively, trust myself to figure things out while inking. I usually decide on a whim what I will use perspective for and what is worth winging. Often times I find adhering too strictly to linear perspective can kill the feeling of a page. After all, "scientific perspective" is just a stab at replicating how we see but I think it ignores the fact that looking involves the movement of the eyes, shifting glances, and receiving an impression of something rather than a factual observation. Cartooning, to me, is about replicating how things feel (the act of looking, existing, time passing, emoting, etc) as opposed to showing them how they are. Most thinks in real life are pretty wonky anyways. 

Between the thumbnail and the rough this page changed quite a bit. This is the first time we see the high school the first chapter of this story takes place in and I wanted to capture that "end of the school year" energy. So I take the reader across its campus and through the front doors. I think leaning too hard on film conventions can be limiting but I am a big fan of guiding a reader through a space. I'm always afraid of neglecting a setting and I find these table-setting pages where I walk a reader through a space to be helpful for both myself and hopefully making the story feel like it's taking place amongst many other peripheral narratives. Considering that the bulk of the story takes place on a remote island, I wanted the pages in the first chapter to feel observed and rigid in their perspective to contrast the more natural shapes and textures later in the book. 

Inking

Above is the initial ink for this page. It was done sometime in 2021 (?) for the pitch package of this book. 

Process wise, I print off the rough, tape it to a sheet of 11x17" strathmore bristol, and use a lightbox to ink over it. For "The Gulf" I inked using a Winsor & Newton 0.8 pen. I don't really recommend them as they run out of ink quickly and I find their line fishtails if you draw too quickly. I committed to using this pen relatively early and am only now reconsidering what tool to use when inking. I don't mind the end result of the utensil but I went through at least two dozen pens while working on this book which does not feel sustainable. 

As I already mentioned, it's important to me that inking feels like drawing and not like tracing. If I am not actively making decisions I get bored. Comics are so laborious that it's important to cater to your own peculiarities when drawing. Roughing and inking blur into each other and this isn't a rigid process - sometimes things are set in the rough phase and other times I make decisions while inking. As you can see, I made the decisions about the specifics of the characters and their costumes while inking. 

I am someone who finds drawing detail to be extremely engaging but I try to resist the urge. Clarity is the key here. This is the phase where I am considering the balance of ink-texture, detail, and the distribution of the solid black areas. 

Personal Edits & Colouring

After inking the page, I scan it into my computer and edit it in photoshop. These edits are through the lens of a neurotic and are often things that no one else would notice; stray lines, tiny frays, wonky word balloons, and little tangents. These edits include adding in tiny details I neglected to draw. Relatively often, I will end up redrawing a panel entirely but more often it's just small details that I feel like don't read well or feel a little too loose. 

The publisher was interested in having the book in full colour but I knew that I did not have the patience or the confidence to do so. Having grown up reading manga and comic strips, I have a preference for leaving things in black and white but the North American comics market prefers things to be colour. Toning the book with a single colour was initially a compromise of sorts but I do believe it elevates the inks and helps contribute to the overall atmosphere and readability.

As with inking, I take a less is more approach when toning and colouring. I want the colour to elevate the drawings and story and never compete with or take attention away from it. I found the tone helped bolster a sense of depth. I experimented with colouring the book with a texture brush but ended up settling on just a textureless colour brush.

Since signing the contract for my book, I've now done more work in full colour due to the Blind Alley Sundays and buying an ipad. I'm now more open to the idea of trying to do a project in full colour but it's not a labour I particularly enjoy. I find the process tedious and, despite enjoying the end result, I don't think I could survive painting a whole book. I also don't know that I would want to work with a colorist because I don't believe they're compensated fairly and I think I am too particular to lend that power out to someone else.

Redrawing

Luckily, this step doesn't happen all the time, but on occasion, such as the above page, I find I have the desire to redraw a page after "finishing" it. This is partially due to the fact that the first iteration was done for my original pitch document in the Fall of 2021(?) and I didn't proceed with inking the rest of the book until the spring of 2022. In the interim, I had drawn a bunch of Blind Alley strips and, as a result, I had improved. Secondly, I had found a way of inking that felt like it more directly expressed how I envision my work. Prior, I'd often fret over the fact that my inks felt "dead" to me and I was always struggling to figure out how to retain the energy of my sketches. This new line did the trick; it felt easier and, as a result, I felt it also read better. The inks were more expressive and so, by necessity, I had to redraw the 8 pages I had submitted with my pitch.

It's such a subtle change that I often wonder if it's noticeable to anyone else. Who knows! I know it's not a night and day thing but, really, in end art comes down to ephemeral nonsense like, "is the energy of this right"?

During university, I became used to finishing an illustration or painting and immediately deciding to redo it. I was aware that I wasn't a confident painter but I am also an overachiever so I built second attempts into my process. It's helpful to not have an ego when you're working on a big project and recognize when a drawing or page just isn't working as intended. It can be incredibly frustrating but I find it best to just accept the L and immediately redraw whatever isn't communicating. Last week, while doing the final edits on my book, I realized the emotional climax of the story wasn't coming across as I expected. I added another page, redrew one, and added a lot more detail to another. It was annoying to suddenly change plans and have to put my Switch down but I'd much rather end up with something I am happy with over clinging to the satisfaction of being finished. 

Submission

Finally, after inking the entire book I sent it to my publisher. They took a few months to get back with notes. As has come to be expected with this process, I had no idea what to expect and had feared these notes would range from "this section doesn't work - redraw it" to "this drawing is bad and you should consider quitting". In the end, my fears were unfounded and most of the edits were extremely minor.

Anyways, this is a frickin' long post. I had a few tangents I thought I would pursue but I've been sitting here for just over two hours and I feel like I need to go bask in the sun for a couple of minutes. 

As always, if you have questions ask in the comments below.

Talk soon,

Adam