Thumbnail Sketches of Comic Book Panel Composition
PART OF MY COMIC STRIP PAGE LAYOUT SERIES
The previous article in this series was about how Santi Sallés used a comic strip layout for his urban sketching, and as I was reviewing his examples, I assessed how they could be adapted for sketching people.
Comic Strip Layout Inspiration from Don Low
This new article looks at how Urban Sketcher, Don Low who is based in Singapore, uses a comic strip page layout for urban sketching people. Although he uses colour in some sketches, his people sketches are predominantly ink lines. He uses a variety of different line weight, and seems to be an avid user of brush pens.
I’ve pulled one of his Instagram post, so we can delve into the concepts and approaches he’s taken with the first two comic book spreads.
Instagram Post – 1st Page
In the first image in this Instagram post, Don has cut the page in half to create to equal sizes panels. Both are ink sketches have no tonal shading on the figures.
- The top panel has a hand-drawn border and a coloured background.
- The bottom panel doesn’t have a border, but there’s tonal shadow shading around part of the figures.
These differences create an interesting play on the visual hierarchy. Neither panel is more dominant.
- The coloured background in the top sketch draws your eye.
- The negative space in the bottom sketch draws your
So although these two sketches are diverse, they’re visually quite balanced.
Instagram Post – 2nd Page
In the second image in this Instagram post, Don has cut the page into 2/3rds at the top, and a 1/3rd at the bottom. And this bottom panel is split into two equal panels. All panels have the same coloured background.
- The top panel is a wide shot
- The two bottom panels are mid-shots
What I find interesting about this three-panel series is the direction the people are facing, and the impact it has on the viewer. The natural journey of the eye with a panel layout is to start at the top left, and travel left to right all the way down.
- The wide shot in the top panel has a lot to take in with the most amount of people, and your eyes scan the scene to take it all in.
- Then you travel to the lower left, and there’s two people – one facing forward the other person on the right is facing left. And it’s this person that creates a natural momentary pause in this panel, because she’s looking in the opposite direction of the natural journey of the eye.
- In the last panel, it’s a single figure facing forward, which helps to lead you off the page.
Another layout feature is how the number of people in the sketch decrease, from the wide shot, to the mid-shot with two people, and the mid-shot with one person. This seems like a natural progression, but I think it would be interesting to experiment with a couple of different layouts. The first option is to sketch panels where the number of people in the scene increase as you navigate down the page. Or have a more erratic layout of it increasing and decreasing as you go down the page – which would need to have a greater number of panels for this to seem intentional.
Don’s comic book spreads use a mixture of high contrast, negative space, spot colour and tonal shading to keep the sketches dynamic and interesting, and this is helped by the using a variety of different panel sizes to keep the visual flow from feeling static and mundane.
Stay tuned for another evaluation of Don’s people sketches in a double-page comic book layout.
