The Drawing Process
January 15, 2021

For the last few weeks, I’ve been busy working on the short story test project. The idea is to try out some drawing processes as well as go through the entire story development.

In this post I want to build upon my earlier post Test Balloon and show how I go from really rough pencil sketches of the panels to final black lines with speech bubbles for the whole page (color and shading are still to come in a later post).

Pencil Sketches
In my earlier post, I showed the thumbnails for each panel. The next step is to draw really rough sketches of the entire page. This is where I start to make room for the speech bubbles.

Red Lines
With the sketches complete, I can take them into the computer and start creating the red lines. During this process I clean up each drawing and create and missing parts.

Red Lines with Text
Next, I finesse the placement of the red lines and speech bubbles. Once they are in place I can start on the black lines.

Black Lines
Then, I create the black lines which will appear in the final drawings.

Finally, I will add the colors and shading. At that stage the backgrounds will start to come alive. But, before I can get there, I need to do the above process for all 14 pages of the short story.