Santi Sallés portrait based on his self-portrait line drawing

PART OF MY COMIC STRIP PAGE LAYOUT SERIES

Comic Strip Layout Inspiration from Santi Sallés

Santi Sallés is an illustrator and Urban Sketcher from Barcelona, who uses panels in some of his sketches to achieve different results.

1. Sometimes the layout is reminiscent of a comic strip that tells a story.
2. Other times it’s a main sketch, with vignettes of varying sizes zeroing in on specific details, and bringing multiple locations together cohesively.

Comic Strip Layout Inspiration for Urban Sketchers

I’ve pulled a couple of examples from his Instagram page, so we can delve into the concepts and approaches he’s taken with these two scenarios.

1. Comic Strip Telling a Story

This series of illustrations documents a 2-hour river boat trip, and each panel captures a view during the journey, or a specific element of interest. The panels vary in width but make a layout with a strong sense of consistency, because they’re all more or less the same height. This uniformity in size and shape creates the look and feel of a traditional comic strip.

In this version he’s included a title and introductory description at the top of the first page, and a paragraph of text at the end that adds additional context to the area he visited.

How Could this Layout Work for Sketching People?

This telling a story approach is similar to what I was trying to achieve with my Photo Booth Style Layout of three sketches, where I sketch from one scene but capture different perspectives or angles. This works if you only have a couple of panels to fill, but if you’re sketching on a bigger page and have a lot more panels, you have to have a longer timeframe or a very busy scene to capture.

When I was urban sketching on my day out in Olhao, the first sketch I did was of a group of children after a Carnaval Parade. An event like this, with so many people would have been an ideal opportunity to use a multi-panel story layout to capture different people and elements within the scene. Each of the groups of school children were dressed according to a theme, and this would have added a range of variety between the people sketches.

2. Main Sketch with Vignettes

In this second layout from Santi, the main sketch is of the Acropolis and the people visiting it. It’s a sketch that has enough information and interest, that it could stand on its own. But he has added zoomed in sketches of areas of interest, using panels of different heights and widths underneath the main sketch.

He’s also added a vertical row of tiny vignettes of singular objects or details from the Acropolis and the Acropolis Museum. This approach is a really dynamic way to combine sketches from different locations into a single page.

The way Santi has laid out the different sized panels, helps the viewer to navigate the page more easily. Your eye is automatically drawn to the main sketch, but then it’s an easy path to work your way through the smaller sketches below and the vertical row of vignettes on the right.

How Could this Layout Work for Sketching People?

Although a lot of urban sketchers love sketching intricate and ornate buildings, the scope of capturing them in a detailed sketch doesn’t really inspire me. I love the quickness and immediacy of sketching people, because you don’t know when they’re going to move out of frame. Sketching buildings feels too static.

I’m intrigued by the idea of creating a page layout which has elements of a building, but the focus is primarily on the people and how they’re interacting with the building. This layout provides an opportunity of capturing small details of the building to illustrate the page.

At the beginning of February I did some sketches of Toulouse from photos. I sketched a group of people in front of the Place du Capitole in Toulouse, and on the facing page I sketched some of the ornate elements from the buildings. Instead of doing these pages separately, I could have sketched all of them together in a grid format, and it would have worked out really well.

It was inspiring to look at the different approaches Santi takes to create page layout grids when urban sketching. It’s definitely given me some pause for thought.