From Script to Comics

As the few of who read these pages from time to time might have noticed I’m working on a new comic. It’s called The Raft, and is coming along nicely at the moment. Here is how I go about making it.

First there is the script. I’ve done countless rewrites of it, and the final story is nothing at all like the original idea I started out with. I chose to write the script in the standard format used for screenplays, using a nice little free software called Celtx. The final script was around 29 pages, while the comic will be around 92 pages once done. Here is the script for page 9.

Script

Once I was more or less happy with the script I began drawing a very rough layout for the entire comics. This way I don’t spend much time on each page, and won’t feel uncomfortable about scrapping whole pages if they are not working. I did the rough on paper and photographed it to get it into the computer as I have no scanner. Here is the rough layout for the same page.

Rough

After completing the entire rough version of the comics and figuring out how the raft itself and characters should look, it was time to actually begin drawing the comic. I took the rough version into Manga Studio Debut and put it in the background. Drew up the panels, and then sketched up the page with the pencil tool on a new layer.

Pencil

Finally it was time to ink the page. The nice thing with drawing on the computer is that you have layers, so once the inking was done, it was simply a question of hiding the sketch layer to get rid of it. This is how the final page turned out.

Inked

I’m reasonably happy with the result, especially the first couple of panels. The last two could do with some improvements, but there is a limit to how much time you can spend on each page when you have 92 pages to draw. :)

by Ragnar B. - October 27. 2006 -