IITS Creative Process - Storyboards

(click to enlarge)

People who see our work often inquire about the creative process behind it. They ask about how we came up with the story and the characters and what it's like to actually...just do this sort of thing. I think that the chemistry between writer/artist pairings are widely varied but Genevieve and I work well because we have a mutual respect and trust for each other's role in the creative process.

When I create a storyboard, I usually act out all the poses and motions so that when Genevieve has a question about how something should look (my drawings are pretty bad), I can show her right away. So yes, that means that many of the suggestive/sexy Kayli poses were drawn from reference of yours truly.

In the above image, you'll see from left to right: my original storyboard, Genevieve's own test storyboard based on mine, and the final art that appears in the comic. Since my original storyboard images are so tiny (about half the size of a playing card), I insert word balloons with the letter "K" or "G" followed by a number. These let Genevieve know who is speaking and the numbers help us keep track of what is being said. Not shown in these examples is the dialogue key where all the lines of dialogue are written out.

For the dialogue, I never try to get it done right the first time because I know I'll never be happy with it later anyway. So what I'll do is refine it as Genevieve creates the images, ask her feedback, take notes, and when I finally get all the images to put together into the page, I do the final writing pass. When the page is edited and formatted properly for printing, I send it to her as if it's the real deal...a perfectly clean page that looks completely finished. If she thinks the writing is funny, snappy, and comprehensible enough...that's what we go with.

I suppose there is a lot more to it than that but this is starting to become a really massive wall of text so we'll just leave it at that. Hope y'all enjoyed this tiny peek into our process.