Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Robot Comic #4


(newspaper format here.)



Everyone who makes comics seems to do things slightly differently. For me, the great unseen portion of any comic, be it a page from a graphic novel or one of these little robot comics, is the thumbnail sketch. Often these little compositional drawings really are not much bigger than my thumbnail, and often barely legible. Sometimes they even have a liveliness to them that never quite makes it into the finished work.

I used to do my thumbnail sketches on loose sheets of copy paper, but lately I’ve switched over to keeping most of my roughs and thumbs and thoughts in big sketchbooks. Those sheets of copy paper are long gone, but with the sketchbooks I can always go back and revisit the ideas when they were raw, or see pages as they might have been. For me, it’s a better way to work.