Few months ago, I'm working with Kuroneko on a manga story that we want to send to Japan. It's been a very fun time, but also a bit tiring.
Our story is shoujo, and it comes from an idea I had thought a few years but never had developed correctly.
Once Kuroneko and I ,literally, DISCUSS the story (hehe) we begin to draw the "name" of history. But, what is the "NAME"?.
NAME or ネーム(neemu) in japanese is the way in which Japanese Mangaka call the first rough draw they made about their stories. They are usually sent to publishers by fax or personally and they read the stories, and they ask to the mangaka to make the changes they considered relevant. Based on the NAME, the necessary corrections are made on the original pages.
In my case, i first draw basic ideas in a normal notebook, to know how it would develop a bit of the story. Based on this I've made several corrections to the pages and I have a more clear and concrete story page.
Now I'll show you a little bit of what I explained above. :)
This is the first rough drawing I made with Kuroneko months ago, the idea is very basic and I think it's quite clear. I just wanted to give me an idea of how would be the distribution of the frames. I really liked, but there still many things that I don't like at all.
Here, the ideas are a little clear and the characters are a little more detailed, but the characters seems to be older than we needed, so i don't used this page at all, besides that according to the narrative I had to change some things. I have to say that we don't have a publisher who can edit or check our pages, haha, so the most of the changes have been instinctive, of visual character and a little bit logical.
Here we make some changes to the layout of the frames. The characters already looks a little bit younger and the sequence is clear. But the frame of the lower left corner didn't convince me at all. So we think a lot of changes we could do with that frame. but for a time, the idea was to keep the same scene, though I didn't like at all. Until this came ....
Few weeks ago I started to redraw a clean (as clean as possible) new version of the pages, with some changes already made in addition to the general ideas of backgrounds. Finally i decided to put a close-up of the protagonist in the frame of the lower left corner. I like how this page has progressed, and although the changes have been somewhat irrelevant change is very clear in the graphic narrative (I think). Even now there are small changes to be made, but that will be made before inking, which is the next process.
I'll write about Inking next time, when all pages are full drawn, I hope is not long after the end of this month....
so, what you said about this? what do you think is the story about?
Thanks for reading!