Old Inks, New Pencils

When we pitched Gay Persuasion nearly 2 years ago (wow!!!), Ollie wrote a couple of test scenes for me to draw and we ended up with 24 sample pages of art. 

Versions of both scenes made it into the book— the scene I drew yesterday had some pages that were identical to the sample pages, and some that had one or two of the same panels, and some entirely new pages.  This raises the interesting question of whether, and how much, to reuse old art.

I knew I couldn’t take the sample pages exactly as they are and use them in the book— for one thing, they’re at the wrong DPI and page size. But even if they’d been technically usable, I would still choose to redo them for continuity's sake. When it's time for me to render the final art in a couple months, I'll have changed as an artist since I made the pitch pages. There’s just no way I can make the rest of the book look exactly like those old pages, even if I tried, and the worst possible result is that they stick out weirdly and it takes readers out of the story. 

This isn’t to say that I think a GN should look the exact same the whole way through— in my experience, it’s impossible to keep the same standard of work through a whole book, because you will get better throughout the process. You might tighten up your lines, or you might get faster & looser, but it takes so long to do a GN that change is inevitable. I actually have very different standards for myself at the beginning & the end of a graphic novel. This is why I like to work chronologically— one of my FAVORITE things is being able to see an artist improve over the course of a book, and that’s because my intro to comics was webcomics! I have such a soft spot for the honesty of webcomics. You have to commit to drawing chronologically, learning as you go, & letting your old art and new art coexist as part of the same project. (My absolute favorite example of this is Always Raining Here by hazel + bell.) 

​I know plenty of artists draw out of order for the exact same reason, though, to kind of camouflage that transformation and make the book look more consistent on average. Completely valid! I just like the visual reminder of how much time it takes to make comics and how much more powerful you become by doing the thing over and over again.

All that to say, I love seeing art get better over the course of a comic, but I don’t want to have a noticeable dip in quality for 4 pages randomly in the middle. The old pages definitely needed updating— and it’s really satisfying to redraw something and see how much better it looks! For example, here’s a comparison of a panel I chose to redraw.

I think the new one has a bit more life in it.

It’s really fun when you realize that you’ve learned something new without meaning to. All of a sudden, in the last 2 weeks, something slotted into place in my brain about drawing faces. I used to draw the outline of the face first and then fill in the facial features, but that usually required a lot of adjusting and scooching things around until they looked right… So I tried doing it the other way around, drawing the facial features and then the outline of the face around them, and it was INSTANT improvement. I barely had to redraw anything, there was no fiddling, everything was just where it needed to be and the angle of the features determined the shape of the face around them. Maybe that’s obvious and intuitive to other people? For whatever reason, it took me until last week to realize there’s a better way of structuring my faces.

Up until now, I’d thought those pitch pages were the best things I’d ever drawn, and I still maintain that they slap. But looking at them yesterday side by side with my new pencils, I realized oh, I’ve way surpassed these. They don't belong in the final book.

HOWEVER. For time saving reasons, I thought it’d be stupid not to reuse the old art in some way. So what I’ve done is taken the inks from the old pages and used them as my pencil layer, and I will just re-ink them in a couple months.

​I’m not gonna lie though, I thought it would be easier to slot them into place?? It took a surprising amount of effort to keep track of the choreography that I’d drawn 2 years ago and reconcile that with the new choreography of yesterday. Making the old & new panels match up with each other was a puzzle that turned my brain to mush. It might have genuinely been faster to just redraw the whole thing from scratch! But oh well, it’s done now. Here’s a page that combines old inks with new pencils.

In other big news, I’m officially over halfway done with the pencils!! Maybe I’ll regret posting this publicly, in case it doesn’t go to plan, but in the spirit of transparency and freeing myself from Deadline Shame, here’s my progress tracker.

I had a slow start, as you can see… but I’ve gotten Serious, I’ve cranked up the Machine, and I believe I can get them done by the beginning of August. I’ve actually just booked a big hand tattoo for August 1st and that might fuck me up for a minute, so I really better get the pencils done by then. Famous last words.

​Hope you've all survived the heat wave, and thanks for reading!! 
Emma