As some point in the process before you really start drawing, you’ve gotta get a handle on the characters you’re going to be drawing. In this case I’ve drawn the Boxing Bucket a bunch before–and he’s not really that difficult to deal with…you see, he’s a bucket with arms and legs.

The other character in this story is Roger Rogers, who in this case is being drawn as an “eyestalk alien” rather than a human. I’ve got kindof a fixation on these aliens (see here and here) and know how to draw them, but the Roger Rogers alien has to have some of the features of the human Roger Rogers, so below you can see some of the preliminary work I’ve been doing in my sketchbook to get a handle on how to draw the Roger Rogers eyestalk alien.

(Click for larger image)

One of the most common misconceptions that people have about cartooning is that it is a spontaneous process–that a cartoonist simply sits down with a blank piece of paper and an ink pen and starts drawing the final published piece. While it’s taken for granted that a prose writer goes through various planning stages and repeated drafts in order to eventually arrive at a final work, the idea that a cartoonist would, by necessity, have to go through a similar process is for some reason a surprise to many. Even people who are fans of comics sometimes don’t have a very clear idea of the process.

Preferring to light the proverbial candle rather than curse the darkness, I thought it might be fun to post my progress on the first page of the “Boxing Bucket” story I’ve been collaborating with Chris Reilly on.

This is the first time I’ve really worked with anyone else on a comics story, and in this case Chris has supplied me with a script for the story–so I’m starting off with a substantial portion of the work already done. He’s pretty flexible with his scripts, though, so I’ll be doing a bit of visual rearranging in the process.

Anyway, here’s the first part of my process: a thumbnailed page with indicated dialog for each panel. I work in different colored pencils, beginning with the lightest colors and gradually getting darker, so that I can slowly build up the image I want. That chicken scratch to the right is all the scene’s dialog, with each line numbered so I can just put a little number in each panel of the thumbnail to indicate what dialog goes in each panel. (click on the image for a bigger version.)