Week 2: Softly Tenderly in Miniature

This week I took the page thumbnails I drew and made them into a miniature comic book.

I ran over the thumbnail sketches of the pages with a sharpie to define the blacks and clarify the page compositions.  I cut them all out to proportional page size and taped them to other small sheets so that they could be double sided.  Finally, I stapled the whole mess together to create a palm-sized version of the finished story.  Voila - Mini Comic!!!

I created a mini comic for two reasons.   First, the thumbnails had several corrections that needed to happen among the pages.  Several panels needed to be moved from one page to the next.  Secondly, this is very inspiring to me because now here in the palm of my hand is a miniature version of the comic!  (tiny yay!)  This gives me the opportunity as well to look over the pages to see if there are any problems with story flow and scene transition. 

Doing this brought two issues to my attention.  The first is early in the story where a segue indicates a time change.  Seeing it laid out in the miniature format let me consider splitting the page in two and making the segue a page turn.   If the final product were a complete book, this would not have been an option as the story is already at eight pages and the finished page count would need to be a variable of four.  Because the book is going into an anthology, another page is a definite possibility.  So I will be breaking that page up and presenting it to Josh to see what he thinks.  This will also give me a little more space to focus on the scene before the segue and give a stronger emotional impact.

The second issue was on a single page where several panels had been moved and had left a good bit of space.  Upon seeing this in the thumbnail comic, I realized that with the extra space, I could add some thematic elements to the page to heighten the emotional impact of the page.  This may take the form of a background element beyond the panels.  More sketching and revision. 

speaking of...I also began detailed character sketches this week.  I only finished one of the characters so I won’t go into it too much.  I’ll save that for next week after I have more work done.  See you in seven!