Meeting with my Mentor
This blog post will not be talking about character sheets like I planned, but about how comic adaptions are made. It’s a long complicated process with layers of work put into it. But the end product is worth it. Enjoy!
Over February break, I met with my mentor Katharine Woodman-Maynard, a graphic novelist who recently completed her own comic adaption of The Great Gatsby. She used watercolor and a digital art platform called ClipStudioPaint and Photoshop to edit her panels. She showed me her art process and gave me some pointers on what I could do and how I could start the page layout. I was personally blown away by how beautiful her comics were, and it got me excited to start the page layouts for my comic. I’ve been stuck on the last four character sheets, so I’ve been working on the story layout and writing down the dialogue as of recently. So I’ve been a bit busy on that front since the meeting.
Katharine’s tips were:
Draw the characters regularly so your hand can get used to drawing them.
Create thumbnails for each page, or at least the pages you get stuck on. But if you want to figure out how many pages you’ll want to draw, creating a page of thumbnails is advised. It makes the page layout easier to follow and less daunting, and it helps find a flow for both dialogue and imagery so your not making stuff up when you start drawing the comic.
Don’t be afraid to make edits/cuts. You may want to make cuts of scenes or dialogue to make the comic shorter or to make it easier to follow. keep only what seems to be important to the story.
4. Make a Comic Script to help you plan out the thumbnail’s layout as well as how they’ll look and what emotions you want them to portray. The script will hold all the duologue for the comic as well as a simple plan on what’s in each panel/page. A Comic Script is like a movie script except for a few key changes:
Page Number (This will hold the information of not just the page number, but what happens on that page).
Panels (This segment in the script holds all the information of what happened in each panel and how many panels there are).
Location (This tell’s you where the scene takes place and what time of day it takes place in).
Dialogue (Charcater’s dialogue goes here).
After I met with my mentor, I was all fired up to get the project in motion.
(This is what a comic thumbnail looks like)
For an example of a Comic Script, here’s a sneak peek into what I’ve been working on for my adaption of this Roleplay: FNAF Season 3 Trailer
Page 1: (Prologue)Two characters and a mystery are revealed. One relays their past while the other confirms a traitor, both of them speaking in an ominous and quiet tone. Their speech is glitchy and full of static. Images lightly flash throughout the page within the darkness.
Panels: No speech will be portrayed within the panels, they will only show images of a book and strange device, blood, broken robots, and a mall (this may change, but for now it works).
Location: A dark space with a glitchy atmosphere.
Bryan: You think you know my story? This is only the beginning...
Bryan: For everything that I knew, I was but a puppet at play...
Bryan: The Darkness won…
Bryan: I knew that I couldn’t defeat it alone...
Bryan: I’m all alone, not knowing if I’ll ever find my way back…
Bryan: I thought the glitch was horrible…
Bryan: I was so wrong…
Bryan: (Unclear high-pitch speech)
Page 2: No images, just text with a blackened glitchy atmosphere
Panels: None.
Location: A dark space with a less glitchy atmosphere.
Bryan: (Unclear high-pitch speech)---
Unknown: (Unclear high-pitch speech)- It was her all along, from the beginning (abruptly cuts).
End of Prologue.
I hope you all enjoyed today’s post! I’m working on the last four character sheets, however, I’ve never drawn Animatronics before so it’s been a struggle to figure them out. It doens’t help that I have artist block, it’ll pass in a few days. Until next time, stay safe and enjoy whatever else you plan on doing.
-Bellapinkpen
