Creating with someone is about collaboration. You can sit alone writing and drawing and never waiver on your vision, and sometimes that works. But most of us work better with a teammate, someone to bounce ideas off of and share a vision with.
Today’s page is a great illustration of our process on The Bait. Let’s dive right into the scary-amazing-wacky-world of Mr. Pantz and Sherief.
We discuss the story ahead of time, Mr. Pantz and I have lunch and he throws the story to me. I give him some feedback and ideas, we brainstorm a bit, and then he writes up a script. I should say he draws some sweet-ass stick figure script. Check out his script for page 15.
He then hands me the stick-madness script, I read through it and laugh heartily at a true masterpiece of story-telling. I then belittle the amount of effort it takes to write, while bemoaning the amount of work it takes to draw. He tells me to get to work and calls me an art-slave.
I then sit down and layout/thumbnail the script. Since he hands me stick figures, sometimes this job is super easy and I just quickly sketch his stick figures to life so that I can choose angles and word balloon placement. Sometimes I take many more liberties; today’s page is one of those times.
I send Mr. Pants the layouts; he gives me some feedback, maybe there is an element I didn’t hit quite right, or something I left out. Since I made a fair amount of changes with today’s page, he had a few lines he wanted fixed. I then told him he was a literary genius. Once Mr. Pantz likes what he sees, he okays the layouts and I start with the art.
After I finish the page, I send it to him one last time to look over. He double checks it, tells me I am the greatest artist who ever lived and he is lucky to have me drawing The Bait. I feel good about myself for about 30 minutes.
Then we start all over again, so we can have a new page for you next week.
Momma told me not to come,
Sherief
Hmm, it was interesting to see how the script evolved.
Thanks. The collaboration is so great, I really enjoy it!