Making Of Willis Henry Comic Part 2: Story Thumbnails

Making Of Willis Henry Comic Part 2: Story Thumbnails

The next step in the comic making process was after making the script, thumbnailing the story.

To aid in the process a template that I used for thumbnailing animation keys, was used to thumbnail the comic story. After reading the header and paragraph of the script, and then sketch out how I saw the words visually. To help track where I was in the story and script; I alternated between red and blue pencil to mark the end of one section and the start of another.

I'm showing the first 4 pages of the thumbnail story. But in total I drew about 120 pages, in about 3 months.

I ran in to the most difficulty in the beginning and in the ending. I had thought that was going to be the case and so I spent more time in those areas. It was slow in the beginning because of my inexperience in overall comic making. I was unsure as to how to exactly draw visually what I had in the script. I had little idea as to how the characters and world would look. Even the small size of the thumbnail frames was a perceived limitation. All of these things made the beginning a challenge, but I rather quickly adapted and once I was relaxed became really fun. I think you may even see the progression in the 4 sample pages.

The difficulty in the ending was mostly in the nature of an ending. I knew what I wanted, a large battle scene, but I had never done such a scene. I was hesitant and glad I left it for the end, because as I came the the 100 page mark I was feeling much more confident. However, for the ending I had to break out of the thumnail framed pages and worked freehanded on legal sized paper. This change just seemed to help get my ideas for the ending out. So I guess, for me, in the beginning the structure of the template helped; but in the end a loose structure helped. "There are no rules, just tools." (from Robert Henri, or someone else far smarter than me)

Note: while printing out and drawing the story on paper was a big help to me in the beginning, it made the next step more difficult. Because I then had to scan into the computer all 120 pages of thumbnails. I never want to do that again! So next book I think I will open the thumbnail template in photoshop and use the Wacom tablet to ruff out the thumbnails. Streamlining the process in this way should save time and effort.

However, I will leave a blank template that you can save to your computer(hold ctrl. and click, save to desktop(mac)). You can then print it or open it in photoshop and adjust or alter it to suit your needs
Enjoy

Trey