And now it begins...

This is the prologue of a graphic novel I'm now producing. These are very first initial thumbnail sketches to get the idea of the story across very VERY rapidly...drawings are less than a minute each...some just a few seconds or so. The thing that takes longer to do is read the script and come up with what you see in your head in the first place. This has been a great loosing up exercise for me and has got me to really see the value of using thumbnails as placeholders for bigger ideas. This also allows me the chance to search at this early stage for visual moments that can work for the given dialogue and narration that I get from the script. I haven't included that here because...well...that's the secret we won't be letting out until the book is done. Also it let's me create independently of both text and format. These are just visual ideas. There are some interesting victories and some humbling defeats but all in all, this is the very first attempt to put pen to paper and let er rip. The focus is to create the icons that will drive the visuals for the layouts and not to create the final comps themselves. I find this method to be useful because it gives the writer the flexibility to revise the story as we progress and also gives me, the artist, the flexibility to plug in new material without affecting the page layouts whatsoever. This is hardly a typical approach to comic creation, but then again, we aren't typical comic creators. In essence this is a huge mess of visual brainstorming, but don't worry, we'll sort it out in the next post.