Now it's time to take the plunge and start getting your ideas out of your head and onto paper. Even if it's rough, even if you change it later, even if you crumple the paper up and throw it away, making preliminary sketches of your digital narrative is a vital early step. Sketching lets you freely experiment with different layouts and ideas, so you can figure out the bones of your illustration before moving on to everything else.
If you have a drawing tablet with a stylus and you've used illustration software before, you can try to draw your sketches digitally. But chances are, you'll be starting out with good old fashioned pencil and paper. Don't forget the eraser! For this step, you should be trying out lots of different styles, stories, layouts, and designs to try to get your narrative right. Like all of our big digital media projects, the more time you spend planning and refining your early drafts, the better your final result will be.
Make a rough sketch of your comic or graphic novel excerpt. Later, we'll turn this sketch into a storyboard, but for now, just focus on outlining your characters, settings, dialogue, and composition.
Do You Know?
What if I'm not much of an artist?
That's okay! With a strong vision and an interesting story to tell, just about anyone can draw well enough to their ideas across. Even Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, was initially turned down by newspaper editors because they thought he couldn't draw.
