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May 2019

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 :stuck_out_tongue: )

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.

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    May '19
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    May '19
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I go straight from my script to the finished product, and sometimes I just wing panels in between, or rewrite the script mid page. I really can't make up my mind sometimes. Maybe I'd be able to some more creative things with my panels if I experimented a bit more with it, but I also gotta prioritize...

Wow, that finished panel is really impressive! I think one should never underestimate the power of stick figures, they're really great for figuring out gestures and composition.

Yeah, planning can be very time costly. I think it's just about finding which technique works best for you and your style of drawing. Plus, some stories work better when given a more natural flow.

I make a "script" where I put the lines and stuff and then draw some thumbnails
My thumbnails are abstract to say the least XD

For my current comic, I kept the storyboards/sketches pretty loose, so I sketched the whole story out at this rough level of quality:

Which was enough to at least get a feel for the flow of the story and rough paneling (although a lot of panels got shifted around, even between pages, during the final art stage).

I would use these sketches as a reference when going into my penciling and inking, and wind up with final pages like:

I script, thumbnail, and letter before I even think about inking anything. Flow and readability are the most important to me

Me- not much. I have an idea of what I want, but I dont really "commit to paper" and do thumbnails. I have this thing where I dont like expending energy on the same process twice, so pretty much the page is coming to life as I work on it based off my mind's images; I do take into account things like composition, leaving space for lettering and flow.

i worte out my who story verse few years ago and as i work i put it to paper, i do sometimes change things like what happens and dialogue ,gotta make it best i can

a lot of planning :blush:

just like every artist here,

i have to think about the scene , the characters in the scene

the dialogue and how it connects to the next page :+1:

we do what we have to do :grin: