Screen 1: From Script to Screen

I couldn't possibly find a better artist than Cesar for bringing my words to life. Cesar's not only a talented artist with a style that suits my vision perfectly; he's an attentive reader of the script, and brings every detail to life. I try to build room for the artist to innovate into the script: I want to be exact about how I see things, but not tell them everything. Cesar uses this room perfectly, "getting" where I want to go with a panel, but innovating as well.

Script to Thumbnail:

Here's the script for Screen 1 again. Let's watch Cesar take these words from thumbnail sketch to pencils to inks.

Night at the Western

For zudacomics

Words: Ray Nayler

Images: César Sebastian Diaz

Lettering: Fonografiks

All gutters and trim full black where panels are not full bleed. Colors are muted, dark, a focus on reds, browns, oranges and the occasional blue.

Screen  1: Night. Splash full-bleed full-color of the Western Motel sign: a neon sign shaped like a cartoony cactus with half of its letters burnt out announcing the W STE N   OTEL and  ACANCY in cursive below.  Post-card-like insets in sepia-tone show different views of the Motel  in better days.

Post card 1: an L-shape of rooms with and office at the left, long end of the L and a detached café. Sleek 40’s cars lined up in front of the rooms.

Post card 2: A pump-jockey in a paper cap filling the tank on a bulletnose Ford with a big grin on his face.

Post card 3: A man in a car coat leaning against the café counter, dinking a coffee and laughing while the waitress leans across, taking his order. Behind them, “Western Motel Café” is painted across the window in 50’s script (backwards from this angle).

Caption: It was the Coke machine that made us stop, and a lonely set of gas pumps on an island between the office and the coffee shop.

Caption: The Bronco’s gas gauge was below the red line and the little yellow E on the dashboard said it was stop now where we could maybe get the tank filled and a cup of coffee . . .

Caption: or stop later on the side of some lonely country road.

Here's Cesar's thumbnail sketch of what I'm going for:

 

 Thumbnail to Pencil:

Which he uses to develop this amazing penciled screen:

  

 I didn't see the thumbnail until we decided to put this page together for you -- Cesar would just send me the finished pencil so that I could proof it before he inked it. Since he nails the mood I'm going for here, and the details (with a few minor differences I would not quibble over -- see if you can catch them), I gave him the thumbs-up, and he went ahead and inked screen 1, the results of which you can see after the jump:

Pencil to Ink:

Cesar's inks are so immaculate that part of me wanted to stop right here, make this a black-and-white comic, and forget about color. But then he sent me a color sample . . . 

And I was completely sold . . .

In the next post: 

Lettering, and rounding out the Night at the Western team . . .