Materials/Processes

As with any form of art, graphic novel illustrators can gather inspiration from a wide variety of things. Although this is the case, there are a lot of illustrators who take inspiration from the mundane, such as seeing a cat running through the snow in Norway and turning him into a snow cat prince (Norlund, 2020).

The process of making a graphic novel is slightly different for every illustrator. For the most part, you do not get big teams of people working on them like you might do with classic superhero comic books.(Lieto, 2018) More recently, there have been a lot of graphic novels published that are made by a single illustrator. The artist will usually start with an idea for the overall story and will work on designing the main characters involved. They will then begin the process of breaking down the story into individual scenes. From here, they will start to create page breakdowns and thumbnail sketches to get an idea for how they want the story to flow, and to figure out the overall composition of each page. Once they have finished this, they will move onto the final illustrations.

The method in which the final pages are produced will vary from artist to artist; it depends on their individual style. However, no matter what media they work in it is incredibly important to have experience with different digital software. A lot of illustrators will draw up their final pages digitally, using programs such as Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint, while others will create their work with media such as acrylic inks and then scan the pages to touch up ready for publishing (Berry, 2015). This whole process from start to finish is incredibly lengthy and depending on the size of the graphic novel itself, can take years of work.