Barbarians At The Gate 2

Okay, after figuring out the basic beats of my story, I made some loose roughs in my sketchbook. Here they are:

These are the first step toward visualizing the story. These aren’t the final layouts, but they are doing the basic storytelling, so I can get the “lay of the land”, so to speak.

From looking at these roughs I decided the panels from these 4 pages could be incorporated into 3 pages. Next I played around with some designs for Scragg, as seen below.

Finally, I started writing out some of the dialogue for the story. I looked at the roughs and wrote out the first draft of dialogue by hand in pencil. Sometimes, I do this right on the roughs, but since I did them all on one page, in quite small thumbnails, there was no room. Here’s the first page of the rough dialogue.

If I were writing the script for someone else to illustrate, I’d have written a final full script with panel and action descriptions as well as the dialogue. Some honing of dialogue and continuity would probably occur at this stage, but since I was going to draw this myself, I left it as is, although I will probably tweak the dialogue when I do the word balloons.

Next time, we’ll look at the final pencils and inks.