Sunday Mailbag- Roughs to Finals?

Q: After reading your book and scouring your instructional blogs I’m still  unclear about your pencil roughs. Once the first rough sketches are penciled out (at normal print size), how do you transfer those penciled images to larger heavy cardstock for inking? Do you enlarge the first rough sketch and put the card stock over it on a light table, or do you re-pencil the whole thing from scratch in greater detail, and ink on top of the pencil lines (and then erase the pencil lines)?

A: My process has changed in the last few years, but what I refer to as “roughs” are often closer to finished pencils than they are true roughs.

The term “roughs” mean very loose and rough sketches that don’t do more than show the basic layout and composition of a page or illustration. Here’s what a true rough of a page might look like (From “HoHumLand”, Page 4, MAD #523):

As you can see, any caricatures or likenesses are barely indicated at this stage. This is mostly about working out the composition, camera angles of the panels, the comic storytelling, etc.

My old process was to scan this, which as you say was drawn at print size right on the layouts as shown here, up to “art size”. In MAD’s case that is 200% of print size, so this page goes from about 8.125″ x 10.5″ to 16.24″ x 21″. Then I place my bristol board (not cardstock) on top and using a light table I would duplicate this rough on the board. Then I would go through and redraw the whole thing on the bristol board in pencil, but this time much tighter working out all the details. Then I would turn off the light table, grab my inking stuff and ink over those pencils. Finally I would erase the panel lines, scan the page and then color digitally in PhotoShop.

These days I skip most of that “pencil on the bristol board” stage and do a much tighter “rough” instead. Like this:

Things are still not exactly “tight”, but all the caricatures are worked out and important elements in place.

Now I will enlarge this to “art size” as I explained before, and put it on the light table. Since the thickness of the bristol board combined with the paper the pencils are printed on cause the lines to be very fuzzy and indistinct, what I usually do is go thorough the page with a pencil and redraw just the important stuff like the faces and any elements I need to work out more fully, plus make any corrections needed or add in anything else needed. Once that’s done, maybe only 25% of the lines on the page have been redrawn in pencil.

Then I start inking ON the light table. When inking the newly drawn lines I will either turn the light table off or use my overhead lamp to light the page surface and cause the pencil lines to be dominant over the light table lines. then I will turn my lamp away when inking the lines that are not redrawn but I see through the board via the light table. I’ll end up with this inked final:

This isn’t a very good example because I made significant changes to this page before inking. I can’t remember why the MAD guys had such a problem with panel three. My original rough has more of a pulled back shot, then we changed that to a close up of the two mail characters. I don’t remember why they then wanted me to flip the action in panel three, I still think the original panel worked better. I also added the Spies in the last panel as that became a running gag in the piece. Anyway once inked I scan and color it:

Actually I have started to revert back to my old way of doing this, where I do something a lot more rough at first, enlarge it and then do the tighter, more detailed drawings on the boards rather than at the layout size. I think the inks are more crisp when I am not looking at things through a light table… they have more life to them.

Thanks to Erik Johnson for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!