With my new collection Kids Are Still Weird coming out this October, I thought I'd give a look into the step-by-step process of a page!

It always takes a while to make a graphic novel, but this book took an especially long time - years! The first and longest step was collecting all the moments with my son Simon that would go into the book. I would jot these down on scrap paper or whatever sketchbook I had. Kind of like this:

This takes a couple years, basically starting with the time Simon started putting sentences together and ending when he started making more sense. Eventually I was ready to start drawing and went through and collected all these notes and transcribed them onto one sheet, and then started picking out ones that felt strong enough for the book. This idea didn't make the final cut for the book, but I thought it'd give me a chance to document each step for sharing.

I don't normally do thumbnails for these comics, though I do think about them visually in my head. I think about whether the idea would work better as one panel, or multiple panels, and what pacing the dialogue needs. I drew these stick figure thumbnails to show how I'd think about this page:

Once I've got my choices, I get my materials ready. For these full color drawings, I use Strathmore 500 series cold press illustration board. I order larger sheets that I cut down into 6"x6" pieces. I had around 150 pages worth of ideas and knew the book would be closer to 104 pages or so, but I like to have more than enough to choose from, so ended with about 120 pages that I'd pencil. For the whole book I went ahead and pencilled the border for each page. For this idea, I decided I liked the single panel version best.

Next time, I'll detail the pencilling stage!