My next step, once I’ve got reasonably solid thumbnails (as seen last post) is to scan those thumbnails and pull out all the colored planning drawing, leaving just the final pencil lines.  This can be done easily in Photoshop by going into image –> adjustments –> hue/saturation and then, in turn, selecting “reds,” “cyans” and “blues” and pulling the “brightness” slider all the way up on each.  Once that’s done I up the brightness and contrast a bit as well.

At this point, I go in (again, in Photoshop) and put in “placeholder” lettering.  I usually hand-letter my work, but it’s absolutely necessary at the thumbnail stage to make sure that I’ve left enough room for the words.  If this were a book that I were going to do completely cover-to-cover, I’d also want to be able to enlarge the thumbnails with the lettering and put them in a binder so I could read the entire book at this stage, so I can get a feel for the whole work (and do any necessary editing) before I do any penciling at all.

Anyway, here are the resulting lettered thumbnails:

(Incidentally, I’ve added a “Count of Monte Cristo” tag to the blog.  If nothing comes of this, though, I’ll just fold it all back into the more general “art projects” tag.)

Just for fun, I thought I’d drum up maybe five pages or so of my imagined graphic novel adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo.  This obviously isn’t a “front burner” project for me at the moment, but I’ll post progress on these pages as I work on them with an eye toward discussing process.  So, here are five pages of thumbnails:

This is of course (if you’re familiar with the story) the scene in which Edmund has switched places with the corpse of his recently-departed jailmate.  He assumes he’ll be taken out and buried in a shallow grave and then, once the guards have left, he’ll be able to cut him out of his sack and dig himself out the grave with his 19th century “shiv.”  This is of course not the case, though…  As it says, “The sea is the cemetery of the Chateau d’If.”

As you can see, I work in multiple colors–a trick I picked up when I very, very briefly worked in animation.  I start in light blue, then move to orange, red and finally a regular B pencil.  This allows me to go over and over an image, building it up and correcting as I go.  I can go in with Photoshop  and pull all the non-pencil color out as I move to the next phase.

I’m using a standard 9-panel grid as a base.  I tend to favor this, as well as a slightly more square than usual page shape, for most of my work.   I’m just guessing at the sizes needed for caption boxes and voice balloons at this point.