Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Jake Wyatt - Editorial Decisions

Something that Jake Wyatt emphasized how important editorial decisions are. While I already knew this, I guess I didn't realize how much you really have to redraw everything in order to get it right. And when he gave examples and spoke he wasn't just talking about drawing thumbnails over and over again to get them right. Many of his examples were large completed drawings that ended up having to be scrapped and redrawn. It can take dozens of attempts to get a comic book page right. But, it’s not just comic book pages, its character designs, settings, etc. Even the story needs to be worked over and redone over and over again.
Along with editorial decisions and drawing and redrawing things he mentioned how ideas are worth nothing. It isn’t until you can draw it that it is worth something. Then, once you draw it, of course, you have to redraw it over and over again in order to get a quality page, design, or whatever idea it is that you are trying to convey.
The point is to not settle for the first attempt, because it is likely not going to be good enough. It will be mediocre if you settle for that first attempt. In order to make something good it needs to be done over and over again, improving each time.

EDIT: And here is a little strip I did quickly to "illustrate" the point.


Okay, so this little strip is also an example of not redrawing it over and over again to make it good, so the result is mediocre, or just plain crappy. But, this strip was just a quick little thing I did to try and make a point and I felt like it was fairly readable. (let me know if you can understand what's going on)


Note: Do not actually throw your drawings away as I do in this strip! (obviously!)

5 comments:

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  3. Woah! It did something funky with the font. I'm not seeing the little edit icon though, so I can't go in and change it.

    Oh, plus I have a little illustration to go with my post that I need to add whenever the edit feature becomes available.

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  4. ideas ARE worth nothing! I don't know about you, but that was a great example of how hard everyone needs to work. Jake makes it seem easy, he is one of the hardest workers I know.

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  5. It's easy to think that after playing with thumbnails and inking your current favorite you've reached the end. You have to actually want it to resist the urge of "well, I'm already this far, might as well go on." I don't remember Jake talking much about deadlines, and I wonder if there is a point where you have to accept something less than amazing to get the piece done.

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