So this week was spent doing character designs. With an exhaustive list of 56 characters that need to be created, it’s pretty easy to flip between characters as I build the library and as more ideas become clearer in my head. Like with the writing process, it’s amazing how sometimes your pencil and pen take you in a direction that you didn’t actually originally imagine. It just happens in front of you and comes from no where.

Each time I draw the character I get more comfortable with drawing them and new ideas manifest themselves to better flesh out the character and enhance their look. Hopefully by the time I have to draw them in the final pages I will have the proper feel of the characters.

For these particular drawings I decided to also play around with my water colours. The truth is I’ve not touched a paintbrush and gauche since 2002 or something like that, so to say I’m completely rusty is a little bit of an understatement. In fact I’d so go far as to say, I honestly suck major balls when it comes to painting at the moment from an already limited experience built earlier on in my life. I’ve not developed this skill at all and I can see how my line art has moved forward whereas my painted work has all but stagnated.

The other major point to make is that I don’t have any of my books around me which basically teach me the basics of water colours. In stead I’m basically learning by doing…which is just going to mean taking a hell of a lot longer to get to a decent standard where I’m not ruining the drawing/sketch with my ghastly colour combinations.

This is a small peek. I’ll be sharing more drawings as they come along.

This week I moved on from character descriptions and turned my attentions to providing a more comprehensive set of descriptions for the world and environment that ‘Aitus Moralis’ will occupy. This was actually much more rewarding than the character descriptions exercise. Originally I was dreading it, because the worlds I imagine in my head are overtly complex and I don’t think I have the skill to bring them to life, but really because I don’t want them to suck.

Like before these descriptions are each giving a single sheet of paper that I start scribbling on, letting my imagination run wild. One of the things that I noticed however was in doing these descriptions this also went back and informed my story as well. I guess I was expecting my draft to expand and change during the next stage of the project, what i didn’t expect was my description for a building to have a direct impact on the sequence of events, moving a particular scene from the middle of the book to the end (to create greater impact).

Which has got me thinking about the route taken for the story. It’s not presented in a linear fashion, by any stretch of the imagination. Is that a good thing? Will it confuse my readers? Will both of them care (hey mum)? I also worry about whether or not readers will connect with the characters. I’m a great believer in letting your character’s actions dictate what they are and who they are, as opposed to them telling you these facts. Letting you build your own view of the character. I’ve been watching movies more intently to understand what makes a great character.

The one thing that I’ve not done yet is begun my research and information gathering for these worlds. This is basically the next three months worth of work. I’m going to be drawing character sheets and building the worlds, both on paper and virtually.

One of the tools I’m keen to use for this project is SketchUp, which I’ve used several times during the design of most of my projects. It’s an excellent tool, which has really grown over the years housing an impressive library of completed and available models.

Next week I’ll be showing the first character designs so far and hopefully the start of the second draft (more on that next week as well).

This week has been dedicated to creating the characters and writing their descriptions. These descriptions were both what the character look like, but also how they behave, how they speak and how I will be showing this in the final graphic novel. As a complete typography nut (not as some people on the internet, I’m sure but a nut nonetheless), the lettering in this book will hopefully be something memorable (whether it’s good or not is debatable).

The thing that made an impression on me however was how the character descriptions were manifesting themselves. I basically wrote the name of every character on a separate piece of paper (the name sometimes was a description itself) and then I’d basically pick up a piece look at the ‘name’ and then start coming up with ideas and tangents. Everything would be written down, no matter how silly or ridiculous. I basically let my imagination flow, like a mind map.

Several times I’d write where the inspiration for this particular character was coming from. Was it a movie, was it a costume, was it an historical figure, all of this was written down. At this stage I’m not worried about the research as I am about putting down ideas down on paper. The research can come in the next stage of the design, as this is still all the early concept stage. These descriptions actually then inform the original draft script as it adds another layer to the story.

‘Aitus Moralis’ has over 50 characters that I have to design. Sometimes the characters would occupy several pages of description, while others were merely a couple of paragraphs. The amount presented is irrelevant; this is all about getting a base from which to start from.Some are obviously more important than others, but they all need to be designed in one way or another, but like lightning, ideas struck and characters were born.

Having completed my first ‘visual’ draft this week, I took a few days off and then began with the next step in the process, character and environment descriptions. Much like my draft this particular exercise began by going through the entire draft and recording the different types of characters that I would have to design and the sets/environments that they would be interacting in.

The idea is to basically brainstorm as much of this world as possible, by breaking down everything into pieces my brain can focus on. This whole process has been just that, breaking it all down into smaller pieces that work for me. This process may very well be completely ridiculous to someone else, but for me it works. The ideas keep flowing. Some of them are great, some of them are crap, but the essence of this is to get every onto paper. Let the idea breathe a bit. Let the idea have a form, even if it’s just something written onto a piece of paper and dies there.

Ideas are like sperm. 90% are going in the wrong direction and 10% are fighting the uphill battle to get to the egg. This process brings those 10% into contention, rather than having all 100% bottled up and waiting to explode…ok I think I might have drawn that analogy a bit far, but hopefully you get my meaning.

Each character or environment has got a page, or a series of pages dedicated for development. This is where the research for each character begins. Magazine clippings, downloaded photos, articles, whatever all get catalogued at this stage to allow for when I start designing the character’s appearance this task is relatively straight forward. I’m sure that during the drawing process more ideas will bubble to the top, but they’ll only have bubbled after I’d gotten everything out there and let it ferment for a few days.

In this, the first volume of ‘Aitus Moralis’, I currently have between 25-35 characters to design. Some obviously are more important than others, but even the simple ones will probably take a good deal of research. This trifecta of documents ‘Visual Script’, the Character Descriptions and the Environment Descriptions provide me with all the founding blocks I need to create my first readable draft (more on this in future posts) and a series of accompanying character design sheets for when the final art is being created.

This is an important day for me. Completed my first ever draft script for ‘Aitus Moralis’. This is what I have been working on for the entire month of January; and this is what 65 pages looks like:

There is still a great deal to be done, but for me, I can look at this collection of pages and take solace in the fact that things are moving in the right direction. Here’s one of the pages so you get an idea of what kind of visual representation this script is:

I wished someone had told me years ago what I should do after next. This next step is what’s kept me back from having completed my graphic novel years ago I think. That’s not completely true, only partly, there were of course many more reasons but this is a big one.

Once the entire story has been mapped out in a series of single sentences, the heavy lifting begins. As before these sentences are grouped in Acts, like in a movie where you have scene changes, I consider each act the stuff that happens been a major scene change. In ‘Aitus Moralis’ these scene range between 5 and 10 pages each and total around 60-70 pages. So in total I’ve got around 70 lines of text. Each line describing a page.

At this stage no dialogue is put, no real descriptions, just ideas. Years ago, Bob Gale (the writer of the ‘Back to the Future’ movies, and one of the architects of the Batman: No Man’s Land year long story) said that it is wise to know where you’re going with a story before you’ve begun it; how you get there can be filled in later.

This has always been something I’ve driven towards. The problem is of course that in the past I honestly thought that the best way to get the process underway was to keep writing. I would do various exercises to get me to write. I’d write a page a day. I’d write random thoughts, I’d just write. I ended up with 100s of pages of script and character descriptions and no graphic novel.

When I came to drawing at the beginning of this sabbatical, I found my scripts didn’t connect with me. I couldn’t visualise what obviously was in my head at the time I wrote it. The problem of course was that I’d written this years ago and so there was no way to come up with the actual result.

The method that I stumbled upon, was to basically take that single sentence and start to scribble my thoughts onto the page. Bits of dialogue, doodles of faces, structure of the page. Panels. Anything that I thought that I wanted to happen. Camera shots that I wanted to achieve. The page then would basically grow organically. These effectively show you what is going on the page indicatively.

Often times I go back to previous pages as I get an idea. It’s all scribbled down. What I end up with is a collection of pages that more or less map out the entire book. From start to finish. Obviously the only person that has any clear idea of what is going on here is me…but that’s ok. I’ve visually created a draft ‘script’ that I can then start building upon.

I wish someone had told me about doing this as I was writing those 100s of pages. I might have had a visual script to work from, rather than 100s of pages of text with no context.

What amused me was when I was at the bookstore a week ago and i saw the Herge ‘Tintin and Alpha-Art’ book which basically showed his ‘script’ to final page methodology for his final unfinished book. The script was pretty much done in the same way.

At the moment, I’ve finished 45 pages in this draft method, seeing as I started this process little over a month ago, I’m on target to finishing off the whole first draft by the end of the month.

Following on from our previous post, we’ve now gotten our paragraph which breaks down the entire story into a few key sentences. So for example Star Wars could be quickly broken down into:

1. In a galaxy far far away, there Intergalactic War between the empire and the rebels.

2. We follow the path of Luke Skywalker who goes from galactic farmer to Jedi.

3. He looses his mentor along the way, but gains a series of friends.

4. He continues his training and proves himself in battle as the rebels try to thwart the evilness that is the empire.

Or something along those lines. So what’s the next step? Well the way I’ve currently been going about it (in this series dedicated just to documenting the creating of my own graphic novel) is expanding those few paragraphs into Acts. These Acts are basically very brief descriptions of the above sentences broken down into pages. It’s all meant to provide a skeleton of roughly what is going to happen within each page and roughly how many pages are going to be required in each Act.

This is useful for many reasons. It gives us a very loose frame from which we can either choose to expand or reduce, depending on which direction we choose to take it. In addition to this we also get a general feel for the number of pages that we’re going to need.

Currently as it stands ‘Aitus Moralis’ has a total of 9 Acts and requires around 65 pages for the first volume. The final page count might go up or down, but by and large it will hover around that number. This might not seem like a large number, but it’s actually a little bit larger than an European graphic novel or a 3 issue American mini series.

Now the last part that’s pretty important for me to disclose is that I’ve actually done all of the above by hand. I’ve not typed any of this up, it’s all hand doodles. I’ve found that this is a much more productive manner of creating than typing it on a screen. It feels more organic to me, which is weird since I’m not a technophobe and yet my most personal project I’m going COMPLETELY analogue (even planning to hand letter it as well).

This will be the first in a series of 52 posts where I actually write something meaty. I know I’ve lost out on one week, so this week you’ll get 2 awesomely crafted posts, lucky (sorry if this post sounds a bit pompous, I’ve been watching A LOT of House recently, Hugh Laurie has never been better, not even in Black Adder).

So what am I going to talk about? I’m going to concentrate on the creative process that I’m currently employing in creating my first graphic novel (which I’ve taken a 6 month sabbatical to progress and reflect on my life). So far I’m 2 months into the process so I thought it would be good to talk about where I am right now with the process, what I’ve learnt and what you can learn if you’re thinking of doing the same thing.

This took a little while but the basic tip I have to give is when you are going to write and draw a graphic novel you have to just get on and do it. If you’re like me, you probably think you’re not professional enough to get on with it. Your art isn’t up to professional standard, your characters aren’t well developed, you’re just not THERE yet.

See the problem is, you’re never going to get THERE, unless you actually start with the process. Unless you put pen/pencil to paper, it’s not going to happen.

So how do you actually start your graphic novel? Well, obviously you need an idea, and you have to want to SAY something. You could be wanting to make a fluff piece on something, or make an action thriller about something, but I don’t care about that. I want graphic novels that push the medium forward, that make you appreicate the piece of art that you are holding in your hands, that is what I’m talking about.

After the Comica Competition, I finally found my method. It did take a while to understand it but here’s the first step of the process. Get your idea, and break it down in ACTS. These ACTS should be no more than a sentence. The describe your entire story in a single paragraph.

The idea is that you take something that is going to take a year to 2 years to make into smaller bite sized pieces, that you can actually digest quickly and easily. You instantly know what you are getting yourself into. You understand where the story is going. What the hook is, what the twist is. You get the skeleton of the story and that is a simple start.

Next post I’ll tell you what you do with that paragraph.