How to get your story ideas across as a beginner or non-artist
You can be a storyteller, no matter your skill level.
I often feel my own drawing ability is less than that of my peers and, sometimes, that can cripple my work output or hurt my communication with others.
I get beyond this speed bump in productivity by educating myself on the things I can improve and trying to focus on the No. 1 goal we should have as storytellers:
CLARITY
Usually, my finished comic-book work is done by other artists that I supply with thumbnails (or storyboards) of what I want them to create for the final product. These thumbnails are often crude, small, and far from attractive, but they get the job done.
These thumbnails need to be as clear as possible.
Here’s an example of a typical thumbnail I would give to an artist to create a finished comic-book page from:
This is the first page of an eight-page Spider-Man comic-book story I wrote for fun. My drawings are small– maybe four inches wide and five or six inches tall.
The drawings are much smaller than a typical comic-book page, or storyboards, so how do I get enough detail in there to achieve clarity?
The answer is I forego the details!
If you notice in the second and third panels, I’ve actually labeled some of the drawing. To the right of the steps of the building, you’ll notice the letters ESU– the name of the school. In the third panel, I’ve labeled all the characters, instead of trying to draw them. Each of these choices is simple and effective, and that equals clarity.
Here’s another example:
This is the next page, where I show off most of the main cast.
The story takes place in Spider-Man’s formative years, with his college buddies. They all have a well-established design that I simplified and boiled down to the basics. Peter/Spider-Man is a head with glasses and a black sweater-vest. Flash Thompson is a jock and wears a letterman’s jacket. Harry Osborn is nothing more than that very distinct hairdo. Mary Jane has a curvy, sultry (albeit simplified) body. Gwen Stacy is a goody-two-shoes with a black headband.
With a few key design choices, I was able to show differences between members of a large cast of characters in these small drawings.
Always try to reduce your characters down to those little but immediately recognizable visual cues that make them, them. I’ll never forget the first time I saw my buddy, StoryboardArt founder Sergio Paez, draw Yoda in, like, three strokes. It was masterful in its simplicity.
Now, I don’t want you to think we aren’t putting effort into the drawing. I want you to become economical in your approach to the drawing.
You have to draw the same thing, over and over. You need to find ways to speed up the process. And for artists with a little less skill, this helps to focus on what’s really important. Once you have a simple character, focus your efforts on the acting of the character.
In the page I posted above, I was able to draw Peter as attentive, surprised, and bashful with very little effort.
Side note: Anime and Manga are great for showing character expressions with minimal effort and have even created a visual shorthand that includes sweat drops and pulsing veins to get the point across.
I know, I know. You’re sitting there, thinking, “yeah, I still can’t draw and this doesn’t help.” But, honestly, look at it more as communicating than drawing.
If it’s your story, you have an idea you want to pass on. Get past the things that don’t matter as much. This is not the finished product and I don’t want you falling into the trap of over-rendering or overthinking things.
I want you to be clear and economical.
The important things to relay to the person doing the finished work are ideas of staging, emotion, camera angles, lighting, etc.
If you look at the examples above, most of my lighting is flat and my camera angles are, too.
The important part of the first two pages were introducing the cast and location and getting the acting across.
When I do need to make a choice on a particular subject like lighting or perspective, I’ll make it a point to get that across. Like in this example from a little later in the story:
In this sequence of panels, there is a blinding light and I actually put a little shading in the first two panels.
Very simple stuff.
Also note that the floor of the second panel doubles as a perspective grid. That’s as simple a solution to a camera angle as can be.
Not every floor or ceiling is made of tiles, but they sure seem to be in storyboards! If you want to convey a specific angle, add the appropriate perspective grid. The lighting in this example is also simplified, as I basically just blocked in the foreground character on the second panel. In the first panel, the important message I wanted to get across is that the character is blocking the light with her hand, so the emphasis is on the cast shadow across her face.
And while staging, emotion, camera angles, and lighting are important, you don’t need to emphasize all of these in each drawing.
If it’s important, add it. Otherwise, focus on what’s important in the frame, like acting and setting. Speaking of setting, can any of you guess what particular class our characters are attending, just by looking closely at the drawing?
My drawings are crude and simple, but get the point across.
In my comic series, The Society of Unordinary Young Ladies, I established a shorthand for all the characters and made very simplified acting to convey the emotion of a scene. I do a little lighting, and I stage a bit of the camera angles, but otherwise, the artist for the comic, Joel Sigua, got the idea and ran with the rest of it.
In this sequence from issue 4, you can see how little I draw and what gets conveyed in the final product:
Some things I want to point out here:
From the thumbnails to Joel’s amazing work, very little has changed. That’s in part my ability to give Joel what he needed in the thumbnails and in part his ability as an amazing artist to add to that.
Where I think about foreground separation/lighting, the effect is usually very minimal. The story itself isn’t heavy in mood and that’s reflected in the sparse lighting choices. Usually, I’ll just use silhouettes, as shown in the examples above.
On the last page, the important shot of our hero emerging from the rubble is the only shot that really needed to show an upward angle. It’s very subtle, but conveyed enough by both myself and by Joel in the finished product.
The acting is on point.
Even the pigtails on Punky convey emotion. As shown in my thumbnails, when she’s excited, the pigtails stick out a little more, as shown in the third panel of the first page.
Finally, there’s simplified character design.
Check out that last panel on the last page. Joel never needed to ask who’s who, even though the characters are drawn in two or three scribbles.
Joel is a master artist and I couldn’t be prouder, but I also know that my effort in the areas noted made his job a lot easier.
Like I mentioned at the beginning, I don’t draw as well as some of my peers, but I know what I want to say with my stories and I’m able to focus my efforts in the areas mentioned.
Wahab
PS: You’ve heard my take on this. What are your tips or tricks for conveying story in the simplest form? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think.