DRAWING
And now we finally get to do the drawing. This is the part a lot of you enjoy the most, this drawing business is what it's all about.
You have your panelled paper, you have your layout and your script, all you have to do is follow it. This is where you reap the awards of your previous work. It's very relaxing just to draw following a well written script and previously sketched layout. Especially with bigger stories it's good to have some structure as it's easy to forget details if you have to work on your project for a long time.
Of course, you still have to think about how to put things on paper, a picture might not look right straight away. And it can even happen that your thought up layout isn't working on a page, or you might suddenly get a great new idea and decide to change the page because of it. But overall it's just good to have something to follow and fall back on. In our case it evens makes it so that we can work on the same volume separate from each other. Because the script and layout have been settled, it doesn't matter in what order we work as long as we meet our deadline.
As you can see on this example, 2 colours of pencils have been used. It's used quite a lot by artists, the blue you use for the rough sketches while the grey is used for the details. We ourselves have abandoned this method as Petra inks the originals erasing the pencil lines when done. The combination graphite and colour leaves terrible smudges when erasing in her experience. But if you ink using a light box, the two colour method can be quite pleasant to work with.
One thing you have to think about is where you want your text-balloons to go and whether you want to add them now by hand or later using the pc. If you already have your dialog written down you know how much text you have to fit in and therefore how big your balloons have to be. Petra adds this stuff much later and does these things by feeling more or less. Usually it works just fine though it has to be said that she will extend the balloons past the panel frames if necessary. If you don't like doing that (it might not fit your drawing/telling style), it's better to take care of this now or you may get into trouble later on.