Prisoner – the process
February 23rd, 2010
Now that the Prisoner graphic novel is finished on here, I would like to fill you in on the process I used to create the comic’s illustrations. And again, if you haven’t visited the author, Dean’s website yet, you really should. Now, I should say, this process is by no means the ‘correct’ way and certainly isn’t the traditional way, it is just the way that I happened to go through it. I very likely would change some things in the future, if I happen to do any more comics. And by the way, if you enjoyed this comic and would like to see more (or really hated and never want me to do it again, goshdarndit!), let me know through the comments at the bottom of this post, or send me a message. If you want to skip past all the wordiness, here is the link to the video demonstrating my process.
My first step was to take Dean’s flash fiction story and read through it multiple times, until I got a strong visualization of it. I decided right away on a rather rough quick sketch drawing style, with very minimal color. I preferred the look of strict black and white and a spot color of red.
Once I had a better idea of the flow and feel of the story, I broke it up into individual page breaks. These should have a good strong visual element that I could illustrate, as well as ending each page with somewhat of a cliff hanger. Knowing that the page is only so large and including an illustration, the breaks obviously couldn’t be overly long. This story went fairly easily, as there is no dialog or much interaction between characters. Though not first person perspective, the entire narrative is rather internal for the prisoner character.
After breaking up the different sections, I story-boarded the entire graphic novel with very quick sketches. Below you can see an example of this. I didn’t write out the entire section, but I did try to design how the page placement would look. The sketch is very rough, really just getting my ideas down at this point. After the entire thing was plotted out, I went to Dean for approval. He was very enthusiastic at this point, but still couldn’t entirely see where my vision was headed. He gave me near full control of the project and was excited to see how it would develop. The only restrictions he gave me were that both the place and the guy should be fairly nondescript. This was because the story is written in such a manner that different readers can place the story differently in their own minds. This later became quite the restriction, especially in such a limited color palette.
After I had the full vision for the comic thought out, I went to Photoshop and laid out the page. I chose the Flood typeface because it matched my intended illustration style and it had a comic book feel to it. I then printed out the pages on 90 pound 9”x12” watercolor paper.
With all the pages in hand, I would draw in my sketchbook to work out the drawing a little better. Most of the time I would either work from found photographs (such as for the rats) or take a photo of myself in the pose that I desired.These were usually pretty quick and sometimes fairly rough.
I would then take this drawing and try to transfer it to my final page using a 4B pencil. I didn’t trace or project it in anyway, just used the sketch as visual guide. The problem that I ran into here was that sometimes I preferred my initial sketch, as it had the rougher qualities that I was looking for. Ah well, that is life. With this drawing, I knew I would be digitally inking it later, so in the places where it would be blocked in with black, I usually just scribbled in it to show my intention for later.
With the drawing finalized in hand, I used a Bright Red watercolor paint over the graphite. This was generally wet on dry technique, where I paint straight on the dry paper, but I occasionally did wet on wet technique as well, where I put down a water wash where I want the color to flow and dip the pigment into that. This was mostly used in the large swashes of red, such as the blood puddle on page 23. After this all dried, I photographed it for digitization (my scanner is broken!). At this point, I got a final approval from Dean for each page.
Once digitized, I edited the camera RAW file to get correct brightness and white balance and brought the image into my original layout file in Photoshop. There I would skew it into place if need be and start to work with the brush tool. I use a Wacom tablet and pen, so it is much more natural drawing, rather than using a clunky mouse. I used a fairly hard (about 75%) black round brush and redrew over the penciled image. One of the other reasons I prefer using a Wacom tablet, is that I can get variation in stroke width, as opposed to using just a pencil on paper. This is to recreate the effect of using a nib pen or brush in the traditional sense.
After being satisfied with the black portion of the inking, I first masked out the red paint areas, then reversed the mask. I cleaned it up further, followed by increasing saturation and contrast. Finito! For the blog, I reduced the size to 600px wide, but the original is at 300dpi, with a resolution of 2550 x 3300.
I created a video of most of this process, though I had a lot of technical difficulties during the entire thing. So, if you watch the video here you can see the drawing stage, minus the very beginning. After that, it moves into the inking process on a different image. This is dramatically speeded up by 800% with some music generously donated by Novice Nation. I’m curious as to what you think of it. Let me know in the comments below.
If for some reason you haven’t read it yet, you can get a free copy of the comic in PDF ebook form right here. You can purchase the print resolution PDF e-book over at Dean’s website for a mere $3, by clicking here. Or if you want a really nice print copy, you can buy that for only $5 over at IndyPlanet.com.
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© This article is copyright of Chris Lane Photo and should not be found elsewhere.
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