8th Feb 2021, 9:00 AM
I had my thumbnail pass and completed the pencils for all the characters on the whole page first. So far so good. Usually I would pencil the backgrounds right after the characters in each panel. For this page, I decided to try a slightly different approach, and decided to hold off on the background pencils until I had drawn and inked the characters on the entire page. I noticed I got the characters finished very quickly using this method, but as I started back at the top, drawing the background for panel one, I started to see flaws in the character drawings - I think I redrew Paige in Panel One a couple of times. She's always a struggle on three levels: (a)making her look feminine, without too many lines on her face (b)making her look Asian and (c)making her look consistent from panel to panel.
I also started to critique some compositional stuff. This character was too big, or too low. That character should be a little more to the left - no, too far, now there's a weird tangent.
During this process I was thanking the Art Gods that I was working digitally, and could easily cut, paste and resize the elements until I was satisfied. Panel Four started to bug me - the characters were all relatively the same size, with their heads all on the same imaginary horizontal line. There was a big empty space on the right side of the panel! The panel lacked any sense of depth, and the composition was not as dynamic as it could be. But I'd already inked all the characters!
What's that saying among writers? "Kill your darlings"?
It was a pain, but it had to be done. I deleted the entire panel and started from scratch, creating the one you now see above. It's not perfect, but I like it a lot better than my first try.
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