Kamilla vs the Petal-Rat!

Here is the first major action scene since the chapter began: Kamilla vs the crater Rat. This is the process of its creation. 

The set-up for the traditional art part of things

Before anything, I want to say that the critter that Kamilla encounters in this scene is not exactly a "rat", or at least the kind that is known as one of Earth's most iconic pests. It's just a common pest on Imest, a city petal-rat, known by most as a "rat" because of its many similarities with its Earthean counterpart. 

Trying to design the "city petal-rat"

Now with the Earth-rat-Imest-rat out of the way, I can finally move on to the real process!

At first, I thought I was already prepared to start drawing the thumbnails for the chase scene. I had its description all written out in the script, which meant I already had a good sense of direction, right? Turns out, that was wrong. I was actually struggling to figure out how I wanted the way the pages to look, even though I was only working on the thumbnails. 

The scipt for the chase. Read if you like!

So, what I did was try to draw up a storyboard showing how the scene would go without having to worry about page composition. My mind is mostly pretty simple and in this kind of situation, my preference is to work on one thing at a time.

Storyboarded

This way, I would be able to get a visual script of what would be happening in the chase scene. My intention for this scene was for it to be both short and (hopefully even) mildly entertaining for the first piece of action in Chapter 1. 

I actually only relied on what I could remember from the written script for the storyboard. Really, my only use for the text version of the scene was to get a basic structure for storytelling so that I could feel a sense of direction. I even had to cut off parts of what was originally planned because it was going on for longer than what I had intended when I rewrote it with thumbnails.

And, although the scene was scripted, I didn't include any specific details on what was going on during the action. As seen in the thumbnails/storyboard, there are small moments where there would be some kind of activity such as Kamilla and the rat jumping on these sorts of platforms, Kamilla falling face-flat onto the ground, the rat jumping onto Kamilla's face, etc. Those things, I didn't write in the script. Instead, these ideas came from two pages in my sketchbook full of small moments I would like to see in the scene.

An idea I had that took inspiration from this

Finally, with having finished a storyboard that I was pretty proud of, I moved on to working on the page thumbnails themselves. Although this required me to pretty much draw each moment again, I was able to easily figure out the composition of the comic pages. 

Turned to thumbnails

As I'm writing this entry, I haven't yet made it to the next step, which is drawing up the pages themselves. But it's really simple - the same way I've done the rest of all the other pages. All I have left to do next are as follows: sketch, line, colour, and publish. Until the next scene requiring some kind of coordination, the process begins again!