Eric Shanower Penciling & Lettering Interview


Welcome to part four. We're going to be talking this week about penciling and lettering and to kind of exemplify that, we brought Eric in and we're lucky to have him. Eric's best known for his work on the Oz series and his own personal graphic novel project, Age of Bronze. Welcome.


Thank you, Patrick. So the first question I have, Eric, is you're one of the few creators still hand-lettering your own work while working for some of the major publication labels.


Why?


There are several reasons why I letter my own artwork. The first reason is the most practical reason which is just that, that's what I know how to do. I don't actually know how to letter digitally. I don't think it's because I'm not smart enough, I could learn it if I had to. Another reason is that I know how to do comics lettering by hand, so why not do it? There's also the aesthetic reasons. Every line that a person draws is characteristic of that person. One person drawing a line, that line will be different than anybody else drawing the same line. So when I hand letter my own artwork, every letter that I draw is my letter, in the same way that every line that I've drawn in the illustration is my line. So the lettering and the illustration sort of form a whole a, a single vision. There's nothing wrong with another person lettering someone's artwork, but I just like the idea of the single vision.


There's a lot of digital tools available for creating, doing lettering, from Adobe Illustrator to Comic Life, or even some more tools. Why should they learn to hand letter, even now?


Well, if a person is serious about learning the craft of cartooning, I think it's important to know the nuts and bolts of lettering. Here's one of my pages that I'm working on right now. And you can see that I've roughed in, in pencil, the lettering for the page. Hand lettering is not rocket science. So it's relatively easy to learn. I think if cartooning is going to be your career, it's important to know the foundations. Also, there's maybe some practical reasons to know hand lettering. If your computer's on the fritz and you're on deadline and you need that page lettered, well, if you can hand-letter, you can do it. If you need some specific font that you don't have, or that hasn't been created, say, for a sound effect, if you can hand letter you can design that and create it yourself. If you need some specific type of balloon for a character, if they talk in some strange word balloon design, you can create that yourself. And it's, for me, it would be much easier to do that by hand than create some, some computer program for that.


Great. We're going to transition to talking a little bit about penciling. So when it comes to penciling your own pages, you know, what kind of advice do you have about starting that process?


Well, I have three items of advice. And the first one is the most important one, which is that comics are all about communication. You are communicating a story to a reader. Your drawings don't have to be pretty. They don't have to be perfect. All though there's nothing wrong about being pretty and perfect. But your main goal is to communicate to the reader so that they understand the story that you're trying to tell them. The second item of advice for penciling that I would have is use the tools that are best for you, and just because you've used a specific tool for a long time doesn't mean that you can never change, be open to change if that becomes necessary. And that's related to my third piece of advice which is to use the best tools that you can afford. For instance I use 100% cotton Strathmore Bristol board to pencil on. Occasionally, I'm asked to draw something on a lesser grade of paper and it's, it gets frustrating. Because I don't get the results that I want. And when I say I don't use the best you can afford, sometimes maybe the most expensive isn't the best for you to get the results you want, so. Using materials that give you the results you want, that's the most important thing.


Great. So the last question is, what's your own process for penciling?


Well, the first thing I do is I either have a full script that I've written or I've received a script from someone else. And I make thumbnails from that script. Then I sit down to pencil. I have cut my paper to size and I've ruled out the image area with a T square and pencil and ruler. Here's the current page that I'm working on. You can see that I've already started penciling here but before I start penciling, I rough in the lettering, I use an Ames guide and T square to put in the lettering in the balloons into each panel. Once I've done that I know how much room in each panel I have left for the drawing so I'm not going to be at the end trying to squeeze the drawings and the lettering in. Then I draw the page. Obviously I've started penciling this page, following my thumbnail as a guide. Here is a thumbnail for this particular page. So here is a penciled page. I've used my thumbnail sketch to draw this page. One thing I think gets possibly short shrift when talking about penciling is the design process. Every character, every setting, all the costumes, all the props need to be designed first. And so I'd like to show a little bit of an example of what I've done for this particular scene. I've designed these characters previously. But for this scene, I needed new costumes for them. So here are the costumes for each of these characters. And this is what I refer to while penciling every panel in this scene. I tend to pencil very tightly. Tight penciling can make the artwork stiff so I have to be careful of that. There's nothing wrong with penciling loosely. This is just what I prefer. It gives me more pleasure to pencil tightly and inking it is easier for me. Other people prefer to ink very loose pencils. This is just my personal preference. One of the techniques I do a lot with penciling is to use a mirror. And I pose for the characters. Both for close-ups and for action shots. One of the best things to watch out for with that, though, is that the characters can start to look a lot like me. And so I have to watch that. Use perspective. I have studied, studied two point, three point, one point perspective. I use mostly two point perspective and one of the other things I need to be conscious of is how tall each character is in proportion to each other. So I have listed in my character sketches how tall each one is. And I use perspective to keep that in proportion to each other and to the scenery.


I had one quick question that I hadn't planned on asking until I saw your art work but, a lot of new artists are trying to make this decision with the work about when the overlapping be got their space and I see on your pencil you sometimes have some, part loop, the character's chin, overlap. Do you ever overlap the gutter space, in your work?


I would only overlap, do you mean drawing?


Like where this


[CROSSTALK] You mean drawing, a part of the character going out of the panel?


Yeah, out of the panel.


I would not do that unless there was a very specific reason to do that, that had something to do with the story, that communicated something specific about the story. I know that people have done that. That's been a thing in comics for years and years. If it doesn't stand out as some problem, I don't see any real trouble with it.


Great. Thank you, Eric.


You're welcome, Patrick.