I draw the panels on Essdee white scraperbooard (the new one). My grid is rather fixed and mostly these days 6 equal sized panels in three rows. I draw to the actual publishing size.
After all the panels have been drawn I will start the lettering. At this stage I make a lot of finetuning to the text.
After lettering it's time to start drawing. Often but not always I start with panel one. Even if I haven't had any break in my work, starting a new issue can feel like I've totally forgotten how to draw. Partly because of this I try to make the actual drawing part as much fun as possible so I pick and choose the panels I want to draw first. Sometimes I want to start with some landscape sometimes with some space scene sometimes with something altogether abstract. There's no penciling but sometimes quite a lot sketching which I enjoy. Scraperboard allows me to make corrections while drawing. I keep my knife close at hand. For everything I use Textmark 500. Totally silly but I have my reasons.
When starting the book I made some decisions in order to make the process as fluent as possible. To have a more or less fixed grid was one of them. Also I wanted to have as much liberty as possible with the subject matter. The writing had to be something that would allow me to move from semi-abstract to cartoony to something drawn directly from a photo reference etc.
Eventually all the panels are drawn and I will have to read the story. If something doesn't work I will try to fix it. Then when I'm more or less happy with everything I send the lot to my publisher. He the scans it and cleans the pictures. When the lay-out is done he then sends it to me to check and I do. More often than not I then make some correction to the text. Certain things are hard to spot from the originals.
And then the issue is sent to the printer and I will try to do better with the next one.
Nuff said!
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