First I receive Nick's scripts. They're different to what I'm used to work in comic books. They're like a text, divided only by paragraphs (which may contain a bunch of pages) and chapters.
My first task is to give comic book format to it, dividing the text in panels and pages, and then I start with little sketches for all the pages. For the first book every chapter had to be divided in 20 pages, but in left I have no limit for that, so there's more freedom to work on each scene.
With Nick's approbation on the sketches, I start drawing. When's ready, I scan the page and send it over to Nick. Then, he gives me comments, suggestions, corrections, or new ideas.
Whenever a change in the pencils is done, I usually take a picture of it and send it to Nick instead of scanning again the whole thing. Then, before sending a package of 10 pages to him, I correct some more details and changes.
For example, here we have Jed and Fred playing they're infiltrating an enemy alien spaceship. In the first try my interpretation of the script was this:
Then, Nick told me that he wanted to visually show their imaginations on the page, so a spacesuit to Fred was added, and laser pistols to both of them. This idea was insinuated in the script, specifying that the backgrounds change at some moments. But here the changes were on the characters, as happened in a previous page that I made them look like robots, but that wasn't specified and fortunately Nick was ok with that. In this case I decided to show these extra elements whenever something fantastic appears in the same panel:
Something else was needed for Jed, he still looked 'normal' holding only a pistol. The solution was this:
So, this is my pretty simple explanation of the process behind the pencils, basically this is the way we work together with Nick in every page. Most of the pages don't need so many changes as this one, only those pages where a new idea comes up or there are many specific things that Nick wants to show.
You can always visit The Official Tiny Life Website to follow the advance of the books closely.
