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The Same Faces pt.1

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I get asked questions occasionally about the process of making comics. I’ve passed this particular question on to a handful of the people I’ve interviewed for them to answer, and I’ll post up more as they come in.

How do you make the faces look the same from panel to panel?

I remember this being a big concern of mine when I started drawing comics, and I get asked this pretty frequently. Probably more of a concern that actually telling a story if I’m honest. I think this is a question that gets asked a lot because it is so apparent when the characters don’t look consistent. Here’s how John Allison, Viv Schwarz, Glyn Dillon and Sarah Glidden tackled this topic;

John Allison (Listen to his interviews here and here)

I’m not sure I ever worked this out in a scientific way. When I was a kid, I drew Transformers comics, and because I was a kid who liked the toys, I knew where all the different bits of their faces went. Optimus Prime had that barn door over his mouth, Jazz and Blaster had visors over their eyes, Shockwave had a hexagon head. Their blocky appearance made getting all those bits in line easier.

I think that’s still what I do. I know what shape a character’s face is, what shape their nose is, what kind of eyes they have, and I put them in the same place each time. And I know that if I don’t properly work out a new character today, and try to draw them several times in the same comic, they don’t look the same each time. It’s not magic, you just get better at copying yourself.

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Viv Schwarz (interviewed here and here)

Good question.

I draw my characters without worrying too much beyond a simple set of rules about their individual proportions, concentrating more on their stance and expression. Then I check all the drawings, comparing them carefully and correct them in Photoshop where they are too far off.

I allow myself some room for variation because my characters tend to be a bit amorphous, their whole shape changes with emotion and their features wander a bit – that’s what I’ve observed happens in animals where feathers, fur or loose skin allow for a lot more expressive shape shifting. I am allowing that for my human characters to some extent as well because I think it reads just fine. I’m also making all the characters in any given story look quite different so that they are easy to recognise even if their shape varies a bit.

I couldn’t keep the faces completely consistent anyway because I myself can’t recognise real people by their features and have to memorise their voice, smell, stance, hairstyle and so on instead. I think that actually helps my drawing more than it hinders.

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Glyn Dillon (Interview here)

I try and learn the ‘ingredients’ that make up a characters face, & the position & proportion of those ingredients, sometimes it takes a while for them to settle, which is why often a character will look one way at the beginning of a project and quite different by the end.
If you do enough ‘pre-production’ work, character sketches, drawings where you’re trying to learn the ‘map’ of the face, then that effect should be somewhat diminished. But it’s still likely that your characters will change & evolve. Even seemingly simple characters like Homer Simpson have gone through changes… the basic ingredients are all there but the positions and proportions have changed slightly over time.
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When I did Nao, I didn’t want her to remain the same throughout the book, I wanted her to look like she’d ‘evolved’ in terms of varying clothes, hairstyles and ageing slightly. So I tried not only to have a consistency to the ingredients of her face but also to have a consistency to her expressions. I tried to give her a recognisable smile that I could repeat, so that even if her hair style had changed, she would be recognisable by her tight lipped smile.
I can understand why it’s a FAQ because it is one of the hardest things to pull off. I look at pages of Nao where I think she looks different from panel to panel, (the one where she’s putting on her make-up springs to mind) but over the book as a whole I don’t think it’s too bad.
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Sarah Glidden (Interview here)
Its hard to keep characters consistent, especially if you’re style is still evolving over time and you’re working on a long project. I have it a little bit easier because my characters are pretty simple, differentiated mostly by their hairstyles/hair color and clothing. Really, if you just looked at their faces, they don’t look the same from panel to panel, but I do my best to make sure you always know who is who.
What is most important to me is that each character comes across as an individual. Part of that means that I am very careful about how each character “acts”: their body language, their facial expressions, whether make eye contact when they talk to someone else, all of these things are less noticeable from panel to panel if you’re just flipping through the comic, but its all very considered. 
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Woodrow Phoenix

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Woodrow Phoenix and Dan Berry talk about the shape of stories, typography, pushing the boundaries of what you can do with comics and an enormous book that you can not buy on Amazon.

Be sure to check out the Make/Tell Patreon campaign and consider donating a dollar or two per episode to help in the production of the show.

Woodrow Phoenix on The Grid

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I talk fairly regularly about how I use a grid to plan out my comics. The grid I use is based on one that the wonderful Woodrow Phoenix distributed when we were working on Nelson. I get asked about it quite often so I asked Woodrow to explain what it is all about. Take it away, Woodrow Phoenix!
If you draw comics regularly you will be familiar with the boredom of marking up page after blank page with the grid you have planned to use, measuring panel borders and margins to make sure everything is consistent. When you’re doing thirty or forty pages, that time really adds up.
One of the best things about working for US superhero comics publishers is that they give you paper with non-repro blue grid markings already printed on them so you don’t need to work that stuff out for yourself. Luxury! And that gave me an idea: I could do the same thing for myself. So I did.
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I drew myself a template that had every possible division on it I could ever need. I work at A3 so I print out an A3 copy and place underneath a blank sheet of paper so that I can then quickly mark out a 4, 6, 8, 9 or 12 panel grid.
There are two templates – one is A4, the other is based on a standard comic book page which is narrower than the European A sizes are. They are both 300dpi so you can print them out or just open them in photoshop and place them under your art to size it correctly. It is also very easy to use the ‘transform’ tool in photoshop to make the templates a different shape if you want. Just open this page, click on it and’select all’ then select edit > transform > scale. Pull the handles to make it wider, narrower or taller as you need it to be. The proportions will remain the same so it will still work perfectly well.
The page is marked with divisions into halves, quarters and thirds which will give you the standard six panel, nine, twelve or 16 panel grid. There are lots of other divisions in between these to make different grids of your own devising, up to 40 panels!
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It looks a little complicated now because there are so many lines criss-crossing this page but as soon as you start using the division you have chosen you will see how they all work.

Alec Longstreth

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Alec Longstreth and Dan Berry talk about convention etiquette, the whole years of his life represented by a book you could kill someone with and his Schedule.

Check out the Patreon campaign to help support the show!

Nick Abadzis

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Nick Abadzis and Dan Berry talk about ideas, the development os a style, motivation, work ethic and letting a story reveal itself to you as you write it.

FAQ Number One

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A few days ago on twitter I mentioned I was going to put together a frequently asked questions page for this site, which prompted amongst others the questions below. I’ve answered them from my perspective and experience, so they are by no means definitive, but feel free to chip in (constructively) in the comments.

Where do I find the ‘perfect’ pen?

Speaking as someone who has been on the hunt for that elusive ‘perfect pen’ for many years now, I feel somewhat qualified to answer this question. The answer is ‘I don’t know’. I can explain from my perspective and see if that helps, but the short answer is ‘I don’t know’. This all depends on what your idea of perfect is. It took me a long time to work this out. When I started drawing with any sense of purpose, I was under the assumption that better tools would make me a better artist. I tried a huge variety of pens and other drawing tools without any real idea of what it was I was looking for. It was like walking into a shoe shop and trying on every pair of sports shoes, sandals and slippers without knowing what purpose I needed them for, but assuming that I’d know when I found it.

The key thing that you need to know when trying out different tool in this hunt is to know what you are looking for. The criteria I started with was waterproof ink, flexible line and comfortable to draw with. This meant I was looking for either a brush or a fountain pen with a flexible nib. This narrowed the range of possible pens I was looking for, and it became easier to rule certain pens out for not being flexible, being uncomfortable or uncomfortably expensive. Scouring pen forums, asking advice on twitter and reading reviews other people have written have all been informative and helpful, but only to the point of knowing someone else’s opinion. I found it particularly useful to spend some time talking to a pen dealer who exhibits at pen shows (yes, they exist) who was incredibly helpful.

To recap, I think it’s a very good idea to have an idea of what characteristics you want your line to have and how much you are willing to spend. It is also worth asking yourself why you want a new pen as well. Are you trying to achieve greater efficiency in your process? Trying to bring a particular characteristic of line into your work? Or. Are you looking for the kind of pen that can draw horses best? I’m afraid those pens don’t exist and what you really need to do is spend more time drawing horses.

If you are collecting small strips together into a book, how do you create a ‘flow’ / select the order?

A very good question. The answer to this one is also ‘I don’t know’. It all depends on the content of the strips. Can they be themed? Are they continuous or can you drop in anywhere? Are some longer than others or are they all one page strips?

My advice here would be to start by making the order logical – perhaps in date order. Then read it through (actually read it, don’t skim it) and then make edits from your impression of how it reads. Trust your gut. Remember that if you have ‘reveals’ or punchlines on pages that are visual or spanned across multiple pages, you want the impact to be on the left-hand page so that it is revealed on the page turn, rather than on the right hand page where it is revealed before you’ve read the setup. The hardest bit is making cuts. If you show your draft to someone and they don’t get it, the problem may not be with them, your strip just might not be that good. At this point, you need to be merciless and cut anything that isn’t working.

If you are left handed how do you prevent your big fat hand from smearing all your beautiful ink pictures to a blob?

There’s a short answer and a long answer to this question.

The short answer; by not rubbing your big fat hand all over it.

The long answer; You get taught when you are a kid that you start at the top left of the page and work to the right and down, which if you are left-handed means you are going to be resting your hand where you’ve just been drawing, resulting in that ghastly smudge. There’s no rule saying that you have to particularly start anywhere on a page, so my advice would be to plan your drawing out ahead of time and start from the top right hand corner instead. It may be worth exploring ink and paper combinations that dry more rapidly. I’ve found that Platinum Carbon ink and cold pressed watercolour paper dries fairly quickly, but it’d be worth trying out a few variations to see what works best for you. That or scheduling frequent and prolonged coffee-breaks between sections of drawing to allow it to dry.

Strategies for how to keep going if your life is a mess?

Again, I think that this all depends on context. How much of a mess are we talking here? If your situation is serious and the wellbeing of others is at stake, I’d say prioritise that over drawing. If it is one of those existential malaises, an eternal ennui that hangs over you like a cloud, then again, think about what you’d rather be doing. If the answer is ‘I’d rather be watching television’ then do that. If your answer is ‘I’d rather be drawing/writing/etc’ then do that instead. Plan your time ahead and figure out what you can achieve in the time that you have. I remember reading about the 1833 factories act and the idea of the 8 hour day, which meant that people had in every 24 hours 8 hours work, eight hours recreation and eight hours sleep. That seems like a huge amount of time each day to me, so figuring out what time you have, what activities make you happiest and the best way to cram one into the other works for me.

How do you come up with your ideas?

The eternal question. I think it cuts to the core of the creative process without ceremony or blowing too much hot air around. The short answer is still quite a long answer, and it is a three-parter for me. I read somewhere a while ago about the idea that creativity has three prerequisites – the physical, the cognitive and the aspirational and this works for me.

The first prerequisite for creativity is the physical means for expressing it, the ‘ability to make lines on paper’ stuff. I often get ideas from the physical act of playing with art, with materials and with processes. The act of producing ‘stuff’ for me sparks off new ideas that bump into other things I’ve already done and make new ideas.

The second prerequisite is the cognitive problem solving aspect of creativity. This is the ability to think creatively around a problem, brief or topic. This is the stuff that only lives in your head until you put it on paper.

Now, you’d think that these two by themselves would be enough, but the without the third prerequisite, the motivation to put them both into practice, you don’t do anything.

Each of these three aspects of the creative process can live alone without the other two, but just drawing aimlessly, having grand plans that come to nothing or even just the ‘one day I’m gonna…’ impulse don’t really cut it for me. When the three come together, you not only have ideas but you also put them together.

The shorter answer is to say that a lot of coming up with ideas is recognising when I’ve actually had an idea. It is very easy to dismiss an idea before it has had a chance to flourish, and it is a skill to take the seed of an idea and recognise that it may need developing until it is good.