We’re in the middle of production now on Ice Age 3, and over a month has sped by without me even noticing it! So, to make up for lost time, I thought I’d show a bit of the process on my story for OOP 2.

I did A LOT of thumbnails for this story to try to figure out the pacing, staging, action and page layouts. I always start out as loose and rough as possible, sometimes only blocking things out in inch-high thumbnails. This particular page went through quite a few subtle revisions, but I had pretty quickly established that I wanted to start the story with a shot of the destroyed mine’s exterior.

After getting the basic composition, I started doing more fleshed out tonals and began thinking more about the inset panels and page layout.

At this point I had already done a rough layout of my entire story. Each page went through several revisions until I got the pacing and page count right, and then did refined drawings over the layouts. Once I was happy with a page’s layout, I’d transfer the refined line drawing onto bristol board and do the final pencil drawing with a 2B .5mm mechanical pencil.

The last step was scanning the final drawing into Photoshop and adding simple color and pushing the value range until I achieved the look and feel I was aiming for. The last step was adding type and word balloons (which I decided to keep to a minimum).