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I’ve been planning on doing one of these posts for awhile, to show you some of the behind the scenes process work that goes on when I create El Cuervo, and other work in general. Contrary to popular belief, I do pull out the sketchbook for El Cuervo here and there – especially when I’m trying to get a particular pose or angle down. You’ll see how some of the panels are laid out and the notes that accompany them.

Without further delay, here are some of the items you’ll find in my sketchbooks. Click the images to see the full size version.

The Concept

This was one of the first concept doodles for El Cuervo. At the time it was going to be called El Diablo, but I changed it for various reasons. You can see the brief outline of a script idea for the story – if you read close enough, you’ll see some of the ideas were still used for the current webcomic.

Graphic Novel Thumbnails

Before El Cuervo became a webcomic, the original idea for the Graphic Novel was to lay it out in traditional format. You can see from these thumbnails how it was going to be set up. I had panel breaking artwork, overlapping panels, and other bells and whistles from the typical Americanized comics planned out.

In the end, I changed the direction because I wanted El Cuervo to work both in print and on the web. And I wanted to constrict myself to panel type work – I relied too heavily on fancy spreads and movement. I figure each panel should have enough interest either through story or visual to carry the meaning presented.

Evolution / Adaptation

Here’s a sample of the webcomic being roughed out in square panel format. The reason why I’ve laid out El Cuervo in squares is to easily translate the work from web to print. On your screen, things are displayed horizontally – so I set up a grid of 6 blocks: 3 on top, 3 on the bottom. That doesn’t work too well when you’re setting up a horizontally based webcomic for print. I can easily switch the grid from 3×2 to 2×3.

There are a lot of webcomics that force you to scroll in order to read the entire page – I prefer to give people everything all in one shot upon the page loading up. Other than the title header image, the comic is the most prominent thing on my page when you land there.

The head shot scene. I’m actually planning on revising a lot of these pages because I’m uncomfortable with the layout.

Character Head Shots

Here is a sample of one of the character head shots pages I developed – if you pay close attention, you can see that One-Eyed Jack still has both of his eyes, and that his last name was DiCampli originally.

I sketched out this head study of Gerard while I was waiting for a computer update. I like sketching in ballpoint pen because it forces you to be more exact and pay closer attention to form. You can actually hatch very lightly, as opposed to liquid ink based pens which are the same consistency.

Mental Diarrhea

It happens. Every so often you have a million things floating through your head and you need to unclog the brain pipes. I actually sketched most of this during a night class, where I had hit a brick wall with some page layouts. So everything that popped into my head, I scrambled into a big messy collage on the page.

I think there’s rough images of a grizzly Hulk, one of the chracters from Spy vs. Spy and some strange vines and floral arrangements. Shortly after I had scribbled and scrawled, the page layouts flowed freely for El Cuervo.

Page Layouts

Just to mix things up, I worked page layouts in a vertical format as well. You can see some of my dialogue notes underneath. I didn’t have a word program handy, so I was forced to hand write a lot of the narrative/dialogue for these sequences. (Not a bad idea, either – so many other things spawned from it. It was a nice change of pace.)

There are times when it is difficult to find reference material for a particular scene you have in mind. In that case, you just have to visualize it, focus, then translate to paper. Here are two images from Eddies’ visit to Nitro after the bullets are removed from his back.

Other Ideas

These are some test sketches for an upcoming strip idea. Most teenage/young adult strips are filled with the same tired cliches – there are few which are well written and fun to follow. I’m still working on details so my comic doesn’t fall into the first category. But first, I have to take care of the first El Cuervo book before fully pushing forward with this idea.

Your Move, Creep.

I’ll leave you with this last image of an unfinished, roughly drawn Judge Dredd. I’ve always been fascinated with the 2000AD stuff, and the Judge Dredd character is so bad-ass that I couldn’t help myself. Again, this is another office doodle with ballpoint pen.

That’s all I have scanned in for now. In the future, I’ll show off some other finished  and unfinished works. See you next week!