It took a lot of planning and curation to come up with a layout I was satisfied with. I’m a visual person so it helps me to have everything drafted. When I was taking classes at SVA (back in 2006) we were taught to create mock ups of whatever comic book we were working on. This way we had a rough draft to work from. 

Now I use Paper by 53 for this process. The idea was to create loose ink drawings of all of the paintings that were going in the book. It’s one thing to have a strong painting but I also needed to make sure it supported the opposite page. It has to flow so I put myself in the shoes of my reader. 

This is an extra step but it’s worth it to get to the finished product. Below are some of the ink drawings that represent the pages in my book. From The Elm to The Empire will be available on April 13th on Lulu.