GYAKUSHU! WEEK!!!

VOLUME TWO comes out this week and as a personal victory dance I'm going to post some BEHIND THE SCENES every day this week. But FIRST...

GIANT DESKTOP FOR YOU!!!


(click to enlarge, then save, blah blah blah...)

There are no extras this time around in the book, it's cover to cover story (no random Tokyopop preview in the back), so here you go...

THE PROCESS!!!

My writing process on GYAKUSHU! has been pretty simple. I plot the whole thing out in super rough notes in my sketch book. I then assign a general number of pages to each sequence, keeping in mind the number of pages I want the entire book to be. It's at this stage that I have to figure out what sequences to get rid of or condense. It's usually for the benefit of the story, so it's not a huge loss, but with GYAKUSHU! I've definitely lost a few rad sequences along the way. Once I have the basic pace and length figured out, I move directly into thumbnailing.

I treat the thumbnailing as the scriptwriting stage. I'll draw each page out at roughly the same size as the actual printed book (so about 5X7). This is pretty big for thumbnailing, and I don't do it on JoyBuzzards, but because I'm writing the actual script at this stage I like to have a solid version of the page finished. EXAMPLE!


Though the finished thumbnail is inked with a brush pen, I'll pencil the whole story out first, in a ridiculously rough form that wouldn't make any sense to anyone other than me. For most action sequences I'll just set aside X number of pages and figure out the action later when I ink it with the brush pen. Pencilling the whole thing first lets me know which sequences need more air and which bits may be unneccesary.

By the time I'm done, I'll have a giant stack of pages (one 5X7 thumbnail per page), roughly inked, with all the dialogue. It's a weird way to work and I don't neccesarily reccomend it, but it's worked really well for me with this story. When I'm done with the thumbnails, I can have anybody sit down and read the book in it's rough form. It's a wonderful way to get feedback. When the time comes to work on the actual page, all I do is take out the thumbnail for that page and I've already got the whole thing laid out. Once I start assembling the page I'll often times change the panels around a bit, but the general map is there.

I pencil everything in loosely, including the dialogue bubbles (which I just eyeball), before inking the whole thing on a 9X12 piece of smooth Bristol (which you can get at any art store). For the inking, I work with a pretty basic set of tools. A Micron .005 for all the line work and a PITT brush pen to fill in the blacks. That's it. For large areas of black, I use your standard bottle of india ink and a terrible brush I've had forever.


Once I'm finished with a page, I'll scan it as a bitmap at 1200 dpi in Photoshop (boy that's big!), before converting it to grayscale. I add borders to every panel, add all the grey and the letters in Photoshop too. TA-DA! It's done.



For as detailed a process as it is, it's a bit haphazard, considering I'll often create character designs on the finished page. I love to plan the whole thing out to a certain extent, but allow for a great deal of improvisation on the fly.

For the writing/production process, I'll put together a playlist of movie music that I think works for the story. For Volume TWO, the playlist included music from the following films/anime:

3:10 TO YUMA (2007)
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
THE FOUNTAIN
FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE
SAMURAI CHAMPLOO
STEAMBOY
PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN 2&3
GOLDFINGER
THE MISSION
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
...and a handful of others.

And there you have it. Another episode of wasting time with Dan. HIGH FIVES!!!

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