Comics process: Rhythm, Sketches, and Dialogue

Did you know False Knees is 60% hand-drawing and painting, 15% Photoshop edits, and 25% obsessing over bird dialogue for days? 

Over the course of several posts, I'd like to take you on a tour of how Josh creates False Knees. It's a fascinating process that most people don't get to see, especially since all his comics are hand-drawn - it's harder to show all the stages. 

Usually, Josh starts with a general idea he has for a comic. He'll draw sketches on large pieces of paper, to start thinking in terms of frames and rhythm - a very important part of a comic is how it "flows", where the punchline is... in short, it's about storytelling. He will number sketches in terms of which frames they'll appear on. 

If the star of the comic is an animal he's not 100% comfortable with, like a squirrel, he'll make lots of drawings from reference pictures, to understand how the animal moves, what it looks like under different angles, etc. 

Then he'll move onto a thick square of paper and draws the outlines of the comic in pencil, and then he'll draw the comic, taking into account where speech bubbles will go. I'll go over more details about this stage in another post! 

After drawing and painting the comic, comes the dialogue. This is the stage at which a comic can sit on his drawing table for weeks! It's really key to nail the dialogue for comical effect. A change of punctuation, a slightly different word here and there can make or break a joke. Comics being a visual art form, it's hard to deliver a tone just with written speech, so it has to be well thought-out. The two of us will often riff off different lines to convey the original joke or emotion he had in mind. 

Very few of these ideas make it to paper, but once he's feeling confident about the dialogue, he writes them on the side of the comic - not in the bubble. This is important, because he works in ink, so you can't erase it and if it blotches, it can ruin a comic that has hours of work put into it. Writing the dialogue on the sides also lets him play with how big or small words should be to fit in the bubbles, and allows for a last-minute change of mind.

Pretty cool, right? I love how different the physical, pre-photoshop comic looks compared to the "finished" version we seen online. I think this is the kind of thing you only see with artists that draw mostly on physical media. Next to the comic you'll also see lines of colours when he was testing his gouache to make sure he's got the right colour before painting. The result looks like a colour palette of the comic.

Below are more images of sketches and comics before digital editing. If you read carefully you may see dialogue that never made it to the digital version, and a preview of what Josh is thinking about for his "Art Crow".

And that's it for this week! Are there any comics you're curious to see in their physical form in future posts? I can take requests :)