Today I'm going to talk about the arduous process we use in making our manga. We probably spend too much time on each chapter. We get about 2-3 months per chapter, but we also have busy lives outside of creating The Misadventures of Tripp Weston. I like to think we're beginning to streamline this process!
Firstly, Evi will write the script. That's a hard job and I don't envy her. This gets sent to me and printed out - about 10-15 pages of written dialogue and descriptions. We go over it and make changes and begin discussing what we want it to look like. Evi will often do many copies, but I tend to only print out the final and write in any changes needed. My copy begins to look really dog eared and scribbly!
After this, I will begin what I call "storyboarding". It's not storyboarding in the true sense of the word, because that word is used in animation. Others would call them thumbail sketches, layout roughs, or the dummy. I begin to seperate the script into pages and quickly drawing out the layout and characters. Because Kiseki is published in asian format (reading right to left), it gives precedence to the left hand page. So I try pace it so that really important action falls on the left hand page. It's not always possible. I always have to keep in mind where the spine falls - you don't want to have something important like a character's face or a speech bubble too close to the spine.
Here are the stroyboards for chapter one:
and a closeup:
As you can see it's drawn very quickly! I just work on lined paper folded in half, so I can fit 2 pages to a sheet. This helps remind me where the spine goes when I'm drawing. Sometimes if I want to spend less time on the storyboards, I will fit 4 pages to a sheet.
This gets shown to Evi and we go through it. We've discovered because I letter the dialogue so roughly, this impedes her understanding the roughs, so these days I scan the roughs and digitally put in the dialogue. But we hadn't discovered this for chapter one. Anyway, once I get her approval, I redraw them as pencils on the correct paper - I'm using I-C Inc. manga paper because I'm too lazy to rule the page lines myself. Because I tend to make changes again here in the pencils, I run it by Evi again. Once all changes are made, I begin the inks.
Here are all the inked pages. Pages 1, 2, 3 were intended for colour so were not "blacked". I don't use screentone, but instead lots of flat black and some hatching. I had a lot of trouble making them presentable for publishing by Kiseki. Because they were drawn traditionally, when zoomed in the lines appeared very rough. So thats why you can tell it's quite smoothed when you view them in the magazine. By now, if changes are needed I say "tough luck!" ^^" By the time I've reached digital editing the inks, I'm always too close to the deadline.
There you have it, the story of a very lazy artist!
