Marquis’s Comic Creation Process

By: Katie Hearns

Hello everyone! For those who don’t already know me I’m Marquis Draper. I’m a junior sequential art major and I’m the Assistant Comic Editor for the HoneyDripper! You may have seen my work with the Comics Villainous: Eckleberg, Villainous: Pop Roxx and a title I am currently working on, Villainous. I wanted to take the time today to share with you my process for creating comics.

When I’m working from a script what I like to do is print out a template for making thumbnails (you can download the template here!) I print out one of these templates per each page in the script. I think it’s a good habit to try two different layouts for each page you work on just so that you can experiment with more interesting compositions that help your storytelling. With the thumbnail stage done I will scan the template and move on to the next stage in my process.

For stage two of my comic process I take my thumbnails into either Photoshop or Manga Studio where I will enlarge the thumbnail that will be the final composition. Sometimes I’ll mashup parts from the two thumbnails together if some panels work better than others. I enlarge the thumbnail to an 11×17 sheet of paper with the outer edge from the thumbnail aligning with the edge of the paper size. From there I begin to rough out the perspective for each panel and make general forms for each of the figures. Once these are solid enough for me to work from I’ll print this out in blueline on a sheet of 8.5×11 paper. I tend to print out my page with crop marks just so that its easier to realign when I scan and enlarge later.

Stage three is the tight rough stage. In pencil ill go over and tighten all of my line art and once that’s done I’ll scan it into the computer for the second time. I resize the tight rough back to full size and then I will print this out on 11×17 paper in blueline. This stage might be a bit expensive for some if you don’t have an 11×17 printer so you might need to go to a printing store if you are trying to work this way.

At this large scale it’s pretty straight forward, just pencil the full-size image, scan, and then that’s it for the pencil stage!