The sketches below show Pinocchio's progression from what I imagine was one of my first sketches of him. In a rough order, you could read them as left to right top to bottom. These changes probably happened over a couple of weeks. I usually do a ton of sketches on my main characters during downtime throughout a typical day. A lot of times I'll rework a character several times before I feel like I've gotten them right (this can easily take weeks, months... in some cases it's been years). Sometimes I'll take something away and add it back, you'll notice the spiky bits of the hair go away and come back. Initially I was going for that typical vampire slayer in trench coat look and I had the painted puppet cheeks thing going on. Thankfully I thought to get rid of those things. I'm absolutely content with Pinocchio's final build.

The Blue Fairy character is an example of one of the more drastic changes from initial conceptual drawings to her final artwork. Initially I had thought of her as being a older regal woman but at the request of Van Jensen (the writer), the character became a much more squatty and gypsy like woman. At first I wasn't sure I liked this design, but it was exactly what Van was looking for. The character really grew on me throughout the story and I ended up liking the final design much more than my initial ideas.

I could easily title this as a guide to how not to work on a comic. My day job is as a graphic artist/illustrator, I worked on several long running comic strips while in college (The Anarchist and God the Devil and a Monkey are two that can be found online if anyone's interested), but this was my first attempt at a 120-page graphic novel. I understand the importance of planning so I started out doing thumbnails, and they were about thumbnail size too (see the top sketches below). That lasted for maybe the first ten or so pages. I can't remember why I didn't like doing that, maybe the size was too small or maybe I kept losing the paper I drew them on, whatever reason, I didn't like it. While looking at a Scott McCloud book I read that he did his thumbnails on notecards and taped them together accordion-style to so he could see how the pages look together (see bottom sketches below). That worked until about page 60, and I got sick of that too. In the end I'd sketch out about 2-5 full-size pages and after inking previously sketched pages I'd go back and see if I was still happy with the layout. That ended up being my preferred process. I sketch really loose anyway, mostly to place things and then fill in finer details with a pen and brush.

When Van and I were first deciding to pitch this idea Van wrote a ten-page opener that we put together as a mini-comic. The catch being we wanted to finish it in time for Heroes Con so we could pass it around to a few people. Below is the result of one of the pages.

After looking at the mini-comic for a week or so I decided that the style I'd done it in was a little more cartoonish that I originally wanted. So I redid all of the pages. Below are examples of the same page with just the inks and one after I added the type and a little bit of shading via the computer. The sketch gets wiped out during the inking process, but they're fairly loose anyway, much like the thumbnails only, you know, page sized.

You might've noticed I drew in all the word balloons. It made sense originally, because I was doing all the computer work using just Photoshop 5.5 (I think I bought it in college in '99 and up until this point it did everything I needed it to). Ideally I would have used illustrator to add the balloons later. I did end up breaking down and getting Adobe's CS4 about midway through the book, but by then I didn't want to change styles. So throughout the entire book I had to draw every word balloon or text box and cross my fingers that I'd made enough room for the text.

On average it took me about 1-3 hours from start to finish for each page, with a few exceptions. I chose a style that I thought would be appropriate but that I could finish in a reasonable amount of time. I'd love to be able to spend all day working on a page, but when it came down to it, after working all day, I really only have about 3-4 hours to work with. So style decisions came down to, do I want this book to be published in the next year or the next five years.

For anyone interested in the finer details of how I work, the materials I used were: for basic lines, a size 0.5 Rotring rapidoliner that I've been using for 10 years (love that pen, love it), for brush work I started out using a Kuretake brush pen but eventually switched to A Windsor Newton Series 7 size 3 brush (probably would've preferred a 2, but the art store was out and I made the 3 work) with sumi ink (I let it sit out for a while so the ink thickens a little. I get a terrific rich black out of it). I used the Canson manga board for the pages (I like all the measurements it has on the side so I can customize the panels quickly and easily, plus it's smaller than the regular comic boards, which saves me time). The shading on the computer was initially done with a mouse, but about the same time I bought CS4 I decided to give a wacom tablet a try, so about half the book is done with a Bamboo tablet.

Check out my art blog here: http://dustinhiggins.blogspot.com/

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