Revised development process cont’d…

The layout phase of my new process for book three of Drafted (still as yet untitled) has come and gone. So far, I am loving the difference that this change has made in my ability to direct the story. A few weeks ago I finished the layouts and sketches for the story and set out to begin the finished production work on the book. My thought was that if I laid out the book ahead of time, word balloons and all, I would get the opportunity to read it before I invested the time and energy to create a finished piece. It worked brilliantly.

There were a few hangups along the way (in particular, a virus wiped out my ancient Dell laptop and I had to get the whole thing wiped and reformatted) but I ultimately was able to overcome and got my layout file set up in InDesign. I find InDesign to be particularly great for this kind of project because it lets me lay the whole book out in one file and link in the images that make up the pages. If I edit the source artwork, I still fall back on PhotoShop, but having the ability to link in the artwork for the pages will allow me to swap out the sketch layouts that I have done now for the finished artwork later with the click of a single button. I find that to be very exciting.

In this case, since my sketches are rough and not composed into pages already, I set up an initial InDesign file in which I composed all of the pages. Since I work at 11″x17″ on bristol board, I set up the pages at those dimensions. I then took all of the sketches that I had put together and arranged them within frames to make up the panels. The frames allowed me to shift and resize the images within the panel dimensions and the fact that the layout file was set up at production size (as opposed to print size) allowed me to print out these layout pages from which to lightbox when I did my penciling. Check it out!

I consider this to be the first real phase of production. Everything prior to this is writing and layout, ideas not form.

The pages are scanned and laid out just as they will appear on the pages. This allows we to re-order the panels, make adjustments for word balloons, and resize or crop the image as needed.

I printed the complete set of layouts at my local Office Max and then taped them behind the actual pages for lightboxing.

The past couple weeks have been a a furious penciling marathon in which I penciled all 30 pages of the book. At this stage it’s mostly just tracing although there is still some content that needs to be worked out as I go. If something isn’t perfect as a sketch I usually just leave it as is and then fix it at this juncture.

Final inks. At this point, ink is on paper and it is beyond my power to continue tweaking and making revisions without discarding finished work.

I’ll try and keep process posts a little more incremental in the future. Things have been happening so quickly recently that if I put aside a post for a moment, I come back and it’s suddenly out of date. Rest assured this won’t be the last post about process, though.

And a few more ink details for interested parties…

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