5



These pages, all copied from the original pencils, are some of the 'spares' I wasn't happy with when I was pencilling 'Another Nail'.



I simply wasn't concentrating when I traced my thumbnail onto the full sized page and the composition was off-- Star Sapphire is too small and some of the characters are in danger of being cropped.



This was a case of a page looking great in the thumbnail but, I felt, flat and too symmetrical in the finished art.



This was a case of a page looking great in the thumbnail but, I felt, flat and too symmetrical in the finished art.



From the first series of the Nail. Another instance of the 'Splash' shot formula creating problems. I thought I was just having a hard time coming up with a dynamic enough figure for Kal's attack on Jimmy until I realised it was the pace of the story that was wrong-- and I moved the splash from page 38 to page 40.



The majority of requests I receive are for examples of the working process-- but examples of thumbnails through to inks (which I have posted elsewhere) really only illustrate the technical process of refinement as a rough sketch is 'polished'. A comparison between a page that failed and the subsequent alternate might give another perspective on the thought process.


This page below featuring the Flash and Atom is from Another Nail. Churning pages of pencils out on a daily basis will inevitably be punctuated with 'off-days'-- not an excuse, a simple fact of life.



The first page above on the left, is pretty static because the Atom is so upright, when he should have been reacting to the cold and wind (even though he shouldn't have been able to feel it within the Flash's protective aura).The second page, centre, was pretty near what I wanted except for the fourth panel which I had attempted to recycle from the first page.I changed panel four in the final version, making the Atom proportionately larger so he wouldn't be lost against the flash.



Below another often queried page from Another Nail. As the Flash speeds across the Multiverse, passing through alternate realities, panel four originally showed the THUNDER Agents fighting Iron Maiden and her cronies but the THUNDER Agents book, which was in the pipeline at the time, fell through and panel four was redrawn to make the characters unidentifiable.



Further examples to show how I keep messing up. In some cases there really isn't anything absolutely wrong with the page... I just thought I could do better.