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All right folks, in this clip we're going to talk about how to make a comic book. All
right, first of all, what you need is the general idea for you story or the setting
in which your story is to take place. So at this stage in the game, if you are the artist
you're going to want to lay down a lot of conceptual design and a lot of early initial
planning artwork. Start to just lay different images down on the blank page, get a sense
of who the characters are going to be that are going to inhabit this universe of yours,
and at this point though really it's just a giant brain pan of ideas. You're not committing
to anything just yet, you're in the early planning stages. Once you feel like your characters
are starting to become more fully formed and you've established who they are and what their
place is in the story, you need to actually sit down and work with the writer. Now I'm
assuming at this point that you are going to be the artist and you're going to need
to bring someone else to write for you. However, you're more than welcome to tackle this giant
project by yourself. Either way, the story comes next, you need to craft the particulars
of the story from the you know, the beginning to the middle to the end. You need to write
down all the action that takes place, all the dialogue. This is essentially a script
that you need to write at this point. You need to write and plan out every single panel,
what happens in each panel and how it relates to the story, all the different lines that
the characters are going to have, that is the next important step. Plan out your story
down to the last, last letter. That'll be next. After this comes the early panel design
phase, you're going to decide exactly how you want to lay out each frame with the story
on the page itself. Figure out how big you want each panel to be, figure out exactly
how they're going to move from one to the next, this is very important. As soon as you're
done with that phase you can move into the early sketch design phase where you go through
and you sketch out each and every frame. You, the artist, with a pencil will sketch out
the action, if you're working with a team you'll probably just do the action that takes
place either in the background of the forefront and then work together in tandem. You design
maybe one character while the other person does all the details and the everything else
having to do with the scenery or the background. I would say this point it would probably just
be you so you'll be sketching each and every panel by hand. At this point then, you're
going to hand it off to an inker. If you yourself are the inker, then again, you still got a
lot more work ahead of you. You're going to go through with a fine tipped pen or several
fine tipped pens of varying width and size and carefully, carefully, carefully ink over
all the little details that you made with your sketch. And your pencil. This is going
to be the permanent final image that you will see and I'm assuming at this point that you're
going to be doing a black and white graphic novel because at this point doing color is
just a ginormous headache and nightmare and if you're working on a small amateur level
you don't have the time to do that, so inking in black and white. The final details, frame
by frame, panel by panel. After that either you or the writer whoever has the steadiest
hand will come through and design all of the spots where the text will go and my suggestion
is to do either a scanning procedure where you scan each page into your computer and
type the dialogue and action in by hand, or do a cut and paste job where you go through
and just literally splice each box of dialogue and each box of action in. I think the scanning
route is a little bit better if you have the capability, if not, cutting and pasting, just
as good. Ultimately then, you'll move into the copying phase where you take the final
finished pages together and have them mass copied and binded. That will be the final
step. Now this is again just the way to do your own graphic novel at home, obviously
in a professional level, there are many, many other steps along with the ones that I just
gave you, but the steps I just gave you are enough to produce your very own graphic novel
at home. Good luck.