Fixing a Boring Panel

This week, I accidentally drew a boring panel. Sorry. But look, look, we can fix it together!

I've been doing a new thing with my pencilling, where I take four to eight pages at a time, draw out all the panels, then really loosely block in the composition of each panel. Previously, I'd get one blank page, panel it, then block out the imagery, then finish up the pencils. Now, though — ha ha! — I've found a way to increase the number of times I iterate on a page! Yay me, old habits pushing their way back to the surface.

The results are making me happy. Even my lovely partner, S, a civilian who does not practice drawing or painting but does have a good eye, said, "your drawings have been looking really good lately." She never comments on my work, which makes it noteworthy when she does. Maybe this improvement is a result of dividing the tasks even further: splitting up the mental tasks of big-picture thinking (looking at the composition), and detail (posing, anatomy, drapery etc).

Who knows. Here's what I do know, though: this panel is boring (below).

It'll get more interesting when it's all rendered and coloured, but on a foundational, compositional level? Boring. Too flat, the sense of scale is not interesting, it's not clear that we're supposed to see the dead Captain Lear at the apex of the bridge (that's the little blob in the middle of the foreground). I do like the way it feels when the walls and towers crowd the top of a panel — I think that's the right feeling — but otherwise this panel needs a reboot, which I only realized once I'd already spent some time drawing it.

It's actually so plain I'm mad that I let it get this far. I am trying to imagine what I was thinking when I first set out on this panel, but that is boring, too, so let's move on.

How?

1. ACCEPT THAT IT IS BORING

Step one is acceptance. I must accept that the drawing is boring, I may not know what to do about it yet, but I must embrace my feelings of disapproval. I know I can do better.

[ I wrote this intending for it to be facetious but upon re-reading it, no, actually, this is just correct. ]

2. DO THUMBNAILS TO FIND A SOLUTION

Step two? Let's see if we can do better. Thumbnail time (below).

You have to ask: am I trying to re-compose the imagery of the panel? Or do I want to take this space on the page and look at something different, i.e. "not do this panel?"

The story has the answers, so maybe I should tell you what's going on. Alexandra's mom, Katerina, and Nikos are all being escorted via carriage out of Vignelli's gates. The carriage is being driven by men allied with Vignelli. Stooges, really. They all anticipate that, outside the walls, they will be exposed to some sort of unknowable pirate terror, and are frightened. But the stooges want to collect Captain Lear's body from the bridge, and they have to dump Our Heroes out while they're at it, exiling them among the unknown terror.

In this panel, I need to re-establish that our characters are leaving the safety of the walls and show you that they are now exposed to the Mysterious Pirate Threat, though I am also showing you that there is no immediate, obvious threat, which maybe creates suspense. In the previous panel, I've shown you how our heroes react to what they're seeing (scared). In the panel after, I show you how the guys driving the carriage are reacting (also scared). In between, I want to show you what they're reacting to, which is, "being in this new place." I also want to remind you about Captain Lear's corpse.

So I could "shoot" from behind Our Heroes' heads, seeing what they see, but then Captain Lear would necessarily be small, on the bridge in the distance. I could zoom in on Lear, but if I do that I lose the sense of "space," of being "among" the environment. I could do two panels: a spacious one, then go tight on Lear, but then my spacious panel is necessarily smaller.

I could "shoot" it all from some birds-eye view or in profile, or isometrically, etc. etc. but I still end up with the problem of "Lear is too small."

I end up concluding that I do not want to show you something different, I just want to re-compose the imagery of the panel to be better. That is what I find in my thumbnail iterations. I end up dropping us down close to Lear, which makes him big in the image, so there's no chance we're losing him. This has the advantage of visually echoing a panel we've seen in Chapter Four, thus reinforcing the connection — the reader should quickly understand who this is, no confusion. I don't go too low, though, because I like seeing the ground plane, which says "our characters need to traverse this space," which is important for the tension and logistics of the scene. It helps the scene make sense.

That's a lot of writing to describe something that happens in a very short amount of time. It's quick to lean back, visualize, and rule out options, and quick, too, to iterate on some thumbnails.

3. ZOOM AND ENHANCE (AND PRINT)

I take my good thumbnail, capture it with my phone, open it in my image editor, and print it out at the same size as my panel (below).

I use an old HP laser printer and regular old 8.5x11 sheets of paper. The panels that I revise this way are rarely bigger than that. When they are, I just print them out on two sheets of paper and tape them together.

It used to be that I roughed out everything, cleaned up my roughs in Photoshop, then used my big inkjet printer to print those roughs out in blue ink. I can't do that here, because Canon doesn't make the ink for my printer anymore and, regardless, this way is much, much faster and I get to spend less time on a computer. If I had a photocopier, I'd be using that instead.

I enjoy how arts-and-crafts this process is.

4. TRANSFER THE ENLARGEMENT

Tape it onto the back of a new page, lean it against the window, and then it's tracing time (below).

I use a new sheet of paper because it's easier than erasing the old image on the first sheet. I put the revised panel near the top of the page so the scanner head doesn't have to go so far during the scanning process. This, I feel, is a considerate thing to do. In return my scanner gives me better scans, I just know it. Thank you, scanner!

5. LABEL THE PAGES SO YOU DON'T GET CONFUSED LATER

Gotta put a big "X" through that old, boring panel so that when I return to it in a month's time I don't start inking it. This hasn't happened yet, but I wouldn't put it past me.

Above, the full page on the left and the new sheet with the revised panel on the right.

Now I have a panel with good foreground-background scale contrast, and we have all our important elements (Lear, the carriage, and the wall). It communicates the idea of "Our Heroes are reemerging into this environment," and the wall still does that thing I like where it runs right up to the panel border, which I think feels subtly uncomfortable. I'm not going to pretend this is the world's loveliest comics panel, but it's much better than it was. Certainly worth the effort. And the colour/lighting will push it further, with the creepy green lighting reinforcing the unsettling atmosphere in the foreground, and the red torches behind the wall saying, "this is a very separate place, you are not in it anymore, good luck with all the spooky green mist."

6. CELEBRATE

Take the rest of the week off! You earned it.

I originally wrote this post as my weekly update for the Secret Readers who support the production of Practical Defence Against Piracy over on the Patreon platform. Join them, revel in this sort of nonsense, and help me focus on fixing boring panels!