If you ever thought of making a comic you probably know how difficult it is. I always try to think even the best ones in the industry had to work really hard to get where they are. We often look at these people with admiration and think "I wish I could do that", but we are not sure how to start.
All my life I've loved comics, remember last post and my Star Wars comics as a child? but in the last couple of years I've been taking it more seriously, and thinking about doing a full comic.
I've been studying drawing with a Marvel artist, I've been learning Audiovisual Design at university, I've seen at least a thousand videos on how to make comics, writing scripts, etc. But I found it really, REALLY hard to start. It's a mixture between being afraid of not meeting your expectations and not knowing where to start.
It wasn't until I saw a couple of videos telling that "It doesn't have to be perfect, it has to be finished", that I said: Lets do it! I'm gonna try.
I sat down, looked at the white screen of my computer and that was it. I didn't know what to write. Two days passed and I had just doddle a couple of characters and had a mere idea on what would be the story about. I also paid attention all time to what message I was going to tell with my story, because one of the things I've learned this year at film school is that even if your work is awesomely cool, if the message you convey doesn't strike you as something you want to tell deep down, you end up being bored or looking at the final piece and saying: Well... it's a really cool nothing.
So once I thought of the message, it was easier to care about the characters and to start having ideas... The problem was that I didn't know how long the story was going to be, I didn't know how much should I do in a day to feel I could be happy with my work, so the whole idea of sitting to work in this giant invisible thing felt veery intimidating, to the point I wasn't writing anything.
It wasn't until I decided to do limit how long my story was going to be (in page amount), and how long it was going to take to do each step towards my goal. I decided it was going to be a 50 page story, because a longer one was going to be too long for a first project and probably would get boring, and not shorter than 50 pages because it would be too short to be worth the effort, and to be able to do something with it once finished (Which is one of the motivations to do so much work for free). As I had a month to write the script, I had to write 5 pages a day.
The artist's excel...
The first day I sat down, tried my best not to act like the writer we all want to be... a cool guy sitting down drinking coffee with a vintage typewriter and a box of cigarettes, I just sat down and wrote until the five pages were done, and it felt awesome! I did that for three weeks.
An other thing very important: For the first time, I didn't tell the story to anyone, because I found that the pleasure of just telling it made me lazy about actually working on it (I don't know if it makes sense to you... but it worked).
Once I finished the script, it was time to show it to my girlfriend and hope for a verdict. I was trying to do other things while she read the script, but I kept trying to look at how she reacted to each page. Once she told me what she thought and encouraged me to actually do the comic I revised a couple of things, corrected it, and started drawing.
I don't want to make the posts too long, so I'm going to cut it here. In the next posts I'll probably talk about how I plan my pages, thumbnails and how I actually draw it.
If you have any question or request for future post feel free to comment, I would love to answer :)
Till next time!
