Plot recieved - working methods

Eileen just gave me the finished plot for issue one. I will think that the comic will be called "Hiraku" for now until Eileen comes up with a better idea.

I've been studying film and animation for a while now so I will approach drawing this comic with those specific pre-visualization methods as opposed to the typical comic book way. The traditional comic book method was to thumbnail panels page by page and hopefully it all fits within 22 pages. I will be drawing oversized backgrounds to recycle throughout the panels like they do in feature animation for camera moves. I'm using this method to make sure I get more consistent with continuity and also to avoid re-drawing backgrounds that get reused. I will also ignore the 22 page limit and allow as many images and space as it requires for me to tell the story. The only thing I care about is that I will be comfortable with the quality of the pages and that each chapter (4 total) will be approximately similar in length. It may take me a bit longer than normal because I will be drawing more that what will be used in the final version of the book. I was first tempted to draw the whole thing digitally but I decided not to to preserve the craft of traditional drawing with pencil and paper. To "keep it honest" I gathered tons of visual reference from online resources. I love that I am able to do that because 10 years ago, this task was very difficult and even more time consuming since internet resources were more limited.

The computer will play a huge role because I will be doing my layouts in photoshop after scanning my rough pencils in. The plan is to do rough thumbnails of panels, making sure that I get all the important imagery in that is required to tell a good story. Scanning all of those in and arrange them in a page layout that makes sense in PS. Cleaning up the drawings and creating a tonal comp. Printing it back out on paper, light box that print to get some real hand drawn work back into it. Scan those and put them back into PS on top of the monotonic painting. Paint some light over the line work. Then I will make basic color pass on top and pass that to Eileen and have her do the final coloring in PS. Then we will letter the text on top. I won't post for a while because I want to finish the first pass of boarding the story out. Then I will make adjustments such as adding panels that I think are necessary. After that I will make the actual rough page layout and I will post those. So hopefully in about two weeks I will post those. I'm only on page 5 right now and I won't have a clue how many pages this story will require but we will find out real soon.