Process Process
I spend a lot of time thinking about process. How to make my art more quickly without sacrificing quality, how to organize images and tools. Comics can be very labor-intensive—layout, researching, penciling, inking, lettering, and so on—so another element to think about is how to keep the whole process fun.
I look at the work of some of the artists I admire—Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Eddie Campbell—and their art looks like it was a blast to make: elastic, playful, but with solid draftsmanship behind it. Of course a prized artistic skill is to make it all look effortless, no matter how much the artist sweated over it.
The panel on the top left follows my first stab at a working process for The Sweetened By-and-By: working out the lettering and balloon shapes on tracing paper, penciling a rough sketch in the space that’s left, inking the balloon shapes and panel lines on watercolor paper, lightboxing the pencil rough onto the watercolor paper, doing a finished drawing in ink, and finally painting. I also scrubbed out the wash on Atom’s suit to make it look shabbier (and to try to improve the contrast with the background), and added some colored pencil on the suit and wall to give it some texture. Whew!
After all that I needed a break, so I went directly to the next panel and brushed on some paint. I tried to suggest some forms with quick daubs of ink. And then I went in with the pen to refine the drawing. Then more black shapes, and a few more washes. Then some additions (dots, highlights) and corrections (the two barstools at left) with white gouache and ink. Much less regimented than the previous panel, and more fun. The downsides: I didn’t plan out the lettering, so I spent time drawing art that is destined to be covered by a balloon. And the drawing, though it was fun to do, isn’t as rigorous as I would like.
So my goal now is to hit a happy medium between these two approaches. Maybe I’ll only do a very rough pencil guide on the watercolor paper, and mostly improvise with the pen (as I did in the bottom right panel.) Or put down a few washes after the balloons, but before picking up the pen. We’ll see. And that will be what keeps it fun.
