We are very pleased to present to you today an in-depth look at Rebekah Isaac’s art process for the upcoming Angel/Faith book, written by Christos Gage. It’s always rather intriguing to see these things in action, and being able to fully see the process (including a script page!) is rather exciting, especially if you’re already looking forward to the book as much as we are. With that in mind, Isaacs has provided us with an exclusive look at the 8th page of the book, from the script to the final colored page, so get your monster hunting glasses on.
Check behind the cut for some Whedon-y goodness.
Script:
After reading through the entire script, I draw out tiny panel layouts on each page of the actual script. I hate to waste paper but later on in the pencils stage it helps me a lot to tape the pages of the script I’m working on each day to the side of my drafting table so I can reference them really quickly. The panel layouts drawn on the script pages are maybe 1 or 2 inches tall and I don’t draw anything just yet, even though I’m imaging it in my head, how I’d like to draw the action in each panel and how much space I’ll need to show it AND fit the dialogue or captions in. I try not to get too fancy with panel layouts. I find they’re only effective if they’re done perfectly, and it’s too easy to mess them up and wind up with a page that needs to be read over and over to make sense.
Design Work:
If the sequence requires it, I may need to do sketches for new characters or monsters and get them approved before I go to thumbnails or pencils.. I opted to take Christos up on his offer in the script, and come up with something different for the design of the demon’s main body. I tried to come up with the grossest thing I could ever imagine living inside of me, and for me that’s this: a combination of a centipede, a mollusk, and a horseshoe crab. AAGH! It’s pretty big here, for several reasons we ultimately decided to scale it down a bit.
Thumbnail:
I’ve been doing my thumbnails on the iPad for about a year, using the program ArtStudio. The precision isn’t great on the iPad but using a stylus I’m able to get just enough of an accurate line to get the job done, and it keeps me from getting too bogged down in detail at this stage. It also saves tons of time normally spent erasing and scanning. Because I pencil and ink my own work I have to keep the first two stages pretty loose; otherwise by the time I get to inks I’m miserably bored with copying the same lines three times. I often leave out facial expressions and clothing and background details; what’s most important at this stage is getting my basic shapes in place so that everything has its place, especially the lettering.
As you can see here, I originally I had all of these panels bleed, which is something I did a lot of before this project, for no real reason than I thought it looked cool or cinematic or something equally silly. Luckily Scott pointed out that it was working against me and made a really great case for using only one or two bleed panels a page. Choosing to make most of your panels non-bleed makes the one or two that DO bleed seem extra significant. So in the case of the reveal of the demon in panel 2, going from a non-bleed to a bleed makes that monster seem even more threatening. And making the last panel a bleed as they leap into action is like the comics equivalent of the bad-ass hero theme blasting out of the speakers in an action movie! But without panels 1 and 3 being non-bleed as a point of reference, panels 2 and 4 wouldn’t have that impact.
Continued belowA few other things had to change from the thumbnail you see here to the pencils. I needed to make the demon smaller to allow more room for the dialogue. And we also opted to make the carapace part of the demon smaller. It’s magical origins gave us a little lee-way with making it bigger than would seemingly fit inside its host, but we didn’t want to go TOO crazy.
Pencils:
From here the process is pretty straightforward; flesh out the details while staying as close to the thumbnail as possible. I shoot my photo reference for facial expressions or tricky poses AFTER thumbnailing to keep things from looking too stiff or photograph-like. Details will change organically as I progress through the pages; for example, I never found a good place to put a floor lamp in page 6 or 7, so it got nixed from panel 2 here. I added in crayon drawings in an earlier page on a whim and so they needed to be added here. Unless background details like that are a major part of the composition, I try not to commit to them too much in the thumbnail stage because adding them in during pencils keeps the whole process consistently interesting and fun. I also left out a lot of the detail on the tentacles at this stage because I’d already drawn them so many times in pages 6 and 7 that I could go straight to inks on them.
This page was approved but I still had personal issues with Faith’s facial expression in panel 1, so I changed it later (inset). I’m not sure I improved the likeness, but I think the expression is far more distinct and interesting. I felt it was too vacant and generic before.
Inks:
For this page I used Speedball ink with a Winsor & Newton Series 7 Sable brush, but lately I’ve been using the Pentel Aquash brush pen loaded with Black Star ink. It keeps a great point and I save a lot of time by not having to constantly wash and condition my brush and rinse out my water jar. Plus it’s a portable set-up that’s allowed me to take my inking work to doctor’s appointments, outings in the park, waiting in airports, etc. Really invaluable when you’ve got tight deadlines. Again, I left some minor details unpenciled (like the framed photos) to give me something to plan in the inks stage to keep myself engaged.
And then on to colors by the amazing Dan Jackson!
