Art & Story – Your Comic From The Ground Up, Pt 2

Our multi-part series of Your Comic From The Ground Up continues this week on Art & Story. This time it’s all about finding the climax and how it reflects the theme of your story, world building, and beginning work on your thumbnails!

Like before, we open with some theoretical discussion followed by some practical techniques.

Theory

World Building (establishing your story’s logic)
How can your location be a character in your story?

• Designing a “real” world
• Designing a “fantasy” world
• Mixing and matching elements when designing props and settings
• Questioning the obvious in terms of architectural shapes

Hashing Out The Story

• Find your climax and work backwards
• Identify your character’s crisis

Thumbnailing

• Feeling out the moments visually
• Sloppy drawing, not necessarily in sequence
• Visual rhythms, finding the “beats” on your pages

Thinking About Format
Good for web & print:

• Square
• Horizontal (approx 10.5″W x 7.5″H)
• Strip

Not so good for web, but good for print:

• Vertical (approx 7.5″W x 10.5″H)

Practical

Building a Reference Library

• Google/Flickr image search
• Photograph locations yourself
• Magazines & catalogues – Great for costume ideas and poses
• Google Sketchup

Thumbnails

• Work on a letter-sized piece of loose paper, measuring out 4 pages of story per sheet
• Draw loosely in whatever writing utensil handy
• Don’t work too much on dialogue, just focus on the visual rhythms and story flow

Building a Theme Library
Compile a library of music, films, or TV shows to have going on in the background while you work on your sketches, style studies, and/or thumbnails. These media should be reflective of the tone or “feel” of the story you’re working on. This isn’t to rip ideas off from others–it’s to help massage your brain into the state it is in when those stories speak to you.

Links mentioned this episode:

• Closing Doors
• John Oxbow: Man Out of Time
• Mulligan’s Run
• Equalizers of the Divide
• The Front

Assignment for this episode:

• Begin a reference library (physical or digital)
• Begin thumbnailing your story (4-up to a letter-sized sheet, keep it loose)
• As you work on your thumbnails, re-examine your character designs and relationship charts to see if anything needs revision

The Art & Story Theme is written and performed by
Mike Gilmore & Mike Johnston of The Northwoods Improvisors.

Follow Mark and Jerzy on Twitter!

Subscribe through iTunes
RSS Feed

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (93.8MB)