Making of Silent Symphonies: Journal #2

Now that I am done with the script and scene-by-scene breakdown, I move over to the thumbnailing process. What I am trying to do here is to sketch out individual thumbnails of each and every page of the whole story. For me, thumbnailing is nothing but storyboarding of the script in an extremely rough messy manner, only difference being that it is done in comic format. It is like building a solid base before doing some serious art. By doing this,

1. I can decide what and how my graphic novel looks and feels like.

2. I can keep editing easily until I am satisfied with my storytelling panels. Editing includes making corrections to shots/dialogues, canceling a whole page if necessary, changing camera angles, blah, blah...

3. I can plan or conclude how much pages I must end up designing for the whole story.

Remember, I do thumbnails in a very rough and doodle-like manner. At this stage, it is also not for audience to see as they probably wouldn't understand anything. It is for you to understand your way of telling the story before drawing the actual pages. I forget about neatness at this stage. I just try to keep my mind free and get indulged into the story... somewhat like mind travel to a parallel universe filled with weirdness... and awesomeness!!! 

Making of Silent Symphonies: Journal #1

Firstly, what the hell is "Silent Symphonies"? Well, it is a creator-owned graphic novel and it is a collection of short stories (not too short!) by three artists living in the southernmost tip of India... well almost the tip! One of the artists happens to be me, along with my super-talented partners of the trade, Kishore Mohan and Roshan. We were planning on this quite sometime now. And it is now that we felt the determination (escape from our laziness) to create stories we want to tell you. 

I got this idea of creating a journal about the making of my story for the GN not only because I want to show you how I work and the procedures, but also to push myself and get over my laziness. To brief about my procedure so far - I had the story in mind for a long time now but I never wrote it down. Recently, as I started writing the script, I realized that it was taking me much further than I had imagined earlier. In short, it's getting messy. Somehow in the end, I figured it out and am now finished with the writing part. 

Soon after finalizing on the script, I broke it down to acts and plots so that I can get an idea of how many pages of comic I will be drawing. Also I wrote each different scenes separately to get an easier reference.

Then I moved on the character designs, which I am still figuring out. I have posted some characters I have been sketching for that purpose. Note that this may or may not be the final designs. 

So, that is all for now. Hope to keep you guys updated on the journal. Thanks for reading... Adios!

The Creature with no Name - preview

The fairy tale graphic novel pages, I been working on, is ready for preview. For those who don't know, this is a short story based graphic novel I am working on my spare time. It might come to around 50 pages or so. Here is a 6-page preview.

Hope you like it :)

Original idea by my friend, Richard Roberts.

Adapted and illustrated by me.

                                                

Baby Boo