Comments: This explains the serious way to create comics. A comics starts from a story which is cut into individual illustrations called panels. These panels are organized in pages. Commercial Belgian-style comics use 46 pages with few exceptions (granted only to famous comic authors). The action begins on page 3, and ends at page 48. This page is number 13. The scenario is as follows: Silvia, then 11 years old, is invited by her granduncle Antonio, the house of whom has been shown earlier to the reader. She discovers a bibelot, which immediately catches her attention, because she understands that the object is from Asiatic origins, like she is (she is born in Vietnam and has been adopted in France). She asks Antonio about the place where her granduncle has found the object, but Antonio gives an unclear answer. Silvia is then willing to take the object in her hands, but Antonio refuses. One can imagine that the little heroin, who is furious to have been fooled, will do her best to know more about this mysterious sculpture later… and you can guess that the object is a key issue for the rest of the story. My scenario-writer asked me to draw 9 panels in this page. He gave me not only a description of what he is willing to see in each panel (including the point of view, graphic mood…), but also what the 3 people (Rodrigo her adoptive father, Antonio, and Silvia) are saying in the balloons. So, I began to make a crude sketch (left image) to see if the text elements leave a sufficient place for the drawings, and to get an idea how the people interact from panel to panel (remember that the comics are a "sequential art"). You must always start from the story, and place the text elements first in each panel. If you put the drawings first, it is clear that you will fail because, if there is a lot of text and you have forgotten it, you will not be able to place the balloons inside the panels. When all that is OK, you can begin a more precise draft, which is shown in the right image. How to get a more precise drawing is the topics that I have explained here:
Silvia 8: comic page creation (for the Drawing Day)


Later I will tell you my experiments with color. You can also visit my comic project’s site:

"Silvia (the adventures of Silvia Robin)"

This site is entirely bi-lingual (french/english), except for the balloons which are only in french. The access to comic pages needs, as said in my current homepage, a secret code. But without code, there are 59 drawings (formerly 52) in 3 galleries to enjoy!