Hello everyone. I hope you're all having a great week!
I'm curious to know to what lengths you go to when it comes to the planning stage of a comic. Do you keep your planning extremely loose? Or do you have every single panel meticulously planned before you dive in to the final artwork?
As someone who has studied animation, storyboarding is something that I naturally do before I plan any scene. With the current comic I am working on only being fairly short, I was able to tighten the script, then get every single page planned out with a fair amount of detail. The comic is basically finished at this point and all I am doing is adding fancy window dressing. However, I felt that this comic needed heavy amounts of planning due to it having such a detailed art style. A single mess-up could mean a lot of heavily-detailed panels to re-draw.
I think it is infinitely hilarious comparing the Godawful scribbles of the storyboard to the polished final artwork. But it's also interesting to see how the drawings change from the original storyboard, too. Just with this example below, there are two major-albeit-impactful changes. The top-right panel in the finished version is overall more dynamic and expressive than the storyboard, while the mid panel is the difference between Ronald and Mercy having a casual chat vs Mercy trying to console an emotionally destroyed and frail old man who has lost everything.
(Oh yeah, forgot to mention this is an Overwatch fan comic )
Now it's your turn! Please tell me about your comic planning process in the comments below. I would also love to see side-by-side comparisons of storyboard artwork vs the finished drawings, if you have any of these.
And lastly, here is my comic if you are interested in checking it out. As mentioned before, it is set in the Overwatch universe and tells the story of the world's first omnic.
Tapas:
Webtoons: