Making Wild Nature
From rough pencils to remakes to finishing
Hello - I thought it would be fun to show you how I write/create pages, cause it’s a little different to how most people do it.
But before I do, a wee reminder that Wild Nature's Kickstarter is still live, with digital rewards starting from £10, print from £30 (incl. free UK postage), and going all the way up to a A4/letter-sized commission - just one left! See you there.
Making a page
This is one of my favourite pages in the whole series. The intensity, the themes coming together, the character development - I’m really proud of it. This image shows the process of the final draft, but it didn’t start that way.
My scripts are… ahem… a bit loose. You might even call them speculative, but they help me get the character stuff down. I do most of the writing on the page. Here’s what this page started as:
You’ll see some changes between this version and the final, lettered page above. That’s pretty much every page I work on. I like re-creating once I’ve got the visuals nailed down.
But I started sketching my layouts based on this and ended up with two pages.
Now, these are pretty cool. Big, bold images, really graphic. I had just re-read Frank Miller’s A Dame to Kill For and fallen in love with his big 2-panel pages. But, for me, this was self-indulgent. If you’ve read the first two books, you’re keen to see the action unfold, not loads of images of Swan posing (that hammer though!)
So, I combined those pages together to up the pace and make something better.
I always convert my pencils into blue lines before I ink. Usually artists use blue line so they can hide it once scanning the page in, but I work digitally so that’s not an issue. I simply find it easier to work on top of.
Now, there’s more diversity to the layout, more tension, and that big panel of Swan with the hammer is more impactful. Here’s the final with colours and no letters.
I’ve spent a LOT of time thinking about how all these pages will work alone and as part of the bigger story. If you back the Kickstarter, I’ll be creating a digital making of book, exploring even more about how I made Wild Nature, from concept to (ahem) execution.
Have a great weekend.
David