- - - Sketchbook - - -

'The Hole' is the result of a collaborative project between myself, Brian Boyd, and Elisa, a student from Guatemala. This collection of notes and drawings is the behind-the-scenes story of how we put it together.



Although Elisa and I have never met, we have worked on several projects. We usually collaborate using a blog. I find that the blog is perfect for this kind of project; we use it for brainstorming, sharing ideas, editing, passing back and forth artwork in various stages of completion and anything else that springs to mind.


























This first section of sketches shows our ideas for the opening of the story. We wanted to use the unique nature of webcomics to tell a story that couldn't be done in a normal paper comic. This scrolling style of comic is called 'infinite canvas'. Our plan was to make a comic that had only one panel - one very, very tall panel.



Before we started any drawing, we used the blog to brainstorm story ideas. Then sketches like this allowed us to see how the story would work. We needed to plan the art carefully, so that only one set of characters could be seen on the screen at any time - to give the illusion that they are climbing deeper and deeper into the Earth without the need for separate panels.





















Elisa's comic art usually includes lots of small extra details - fun things that the reader can notice while reading the story. For this comic we had the idea of showing all kinds of unusual items buried in the ground around the hole. In this first series of sketches you can see a spanner, a treasure chest, a dinosaur skeleton and R2D2 from the Star Wars movies. In the finished story you can find many others, including objects and characters from some of Elisa's favourite films.

















Since Elisa was studying phrasal verbs in her English classes at the time we started work on the story, we decided to include lots of phrasal verbs in the dialogue. How many can you find in the finished comic?



It didn't take us long to work out a system, and week by week the hole grew deeper. Working from our script ideas, I would write the dialogue and make rough sketches similar to this one here. Elisa worked from those to make black and white line art, adding her own details and humour to the art. Back in Bangkok, I would add colour, panels, balloons and text.

This next series of pictures show how the illustrations developed from Elisa's line art to the finished coloured version. The line art was drawn freehand on A4 paper. Those pictures were then scanned, and colour and shading were added in the computer.



























































Finally, here are some more rough sketches alongside the finished artwork. These show the final part of the story. By this stage we had developed a good system and were working quite quickly.




































































Hope you've enjoyed this little sneak peek at The Hole in development. Click here to return to the comic.