Script to Comic Interior Page Action

 

This is process page for a recent sequential sample you can view in my portfolio. The script is written in full script format and was a short piece written by myself set in Mad Cave's Endless Night and Exit City series.  It features the protagonist Miller who is armed and ready for Mr. Black's private security team to rush in to confront her.

Here is the script for this page I breakdown further in this post. The main two things I was considering in the layout was in PANEL 2 to leave space for text, as it's the only dialog on the page. As written, PANEL 4 is a large panel of the guards firing into the room, so I made sure in the rough sketches that I left the most real estate on the page for this panel. 

This rough layout is the first two steps in my comic illustration process. Drawn in Photoshop (but sometimes on paper) I sketch some mannequins of the character in action for the scene. I do a few variations until I'm happy with the layouts and positioning of the characters. The second step in this process is utilizing Sketchup for some of the linear perspective. I create rudimentary structures fairly quickly in Sketchup and superimpose them on top of my rough sketches - in this example I have rifles angled in various ways.

Once the rough sketch is completed, I import the low resolution JPG into Clip Studio where I continue to work on the comic interior page. I rule my panel borders and setup 1 and 3 point perspective rulers for the individual panels. I usually don't use 2 point perspective. I continue to tie down the mannequins over the roughs, keeping attention to maintain the energy from the loose sketches.

This is the inking and finishing work-in-progress. I begin the page with creating holding lines for all the characters to separate them from the background. I'm looking for tangents and placing lines in ways they overlap properly to avoid flattening the scene. I'm also using various line weights to emphasize the closer objects from the ones farther back. Next is drafting in the backgrounds for all the panels and after inking the interior lines of the characters.

Here is the completed page 3 from this short action sequence. Once the interior lines of the characters have been made, I spot the blacks and feather them where necessary to transition the highlight to shadow areas. I decided to black out the page as well, but for easy reading and so the panel did not blend into the background I maintained the white gutters.

Grims Two is a freelance digital illustrator and comic artist based in Canada. Published in several anthologies and featured in such projects as 3 Panel Crimes and Platform Comics. Available for commissions and assignments for covers and sequentials.