Tuesday Tip: Sprinkling Creativity Throughout the Process

Making changes to a graphic novel that's well underway usually involves redrawing loads of pages and discarding hours of work. If one page takes about 1 to 3 days on average, then redoing 10 pages could represents nearly a month's worth of work. In such types of creative processes, where the toll of editing increases as the project progresses, pre-planning becomes crucial to avoid disasters in the long run (animation is another such process). In reaction, some artists will front-end the creative (and fun) work, only to find that they've turned themselves into drawing machines for the rest of the process. To keep the creative fun throughout the process, only plan early on what you must to ensure smooth transitions from phase to phase, and keep as much as possible to be decided, invented, created for the rest of the journey. For example, when you are the same person penciling and inking a page, "push your pencils" (draw and redraw until it's correct) only on the important elements. For the rest, say for trees or landscapes, merely sketch approximate shapes, so that you can playfully and creatively ink them in later on.