How to draw comics the Elftorp way. Or The story of two pages.
May take a while to load. I wanted to make it possible to read the text.

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PAGE 04.
Layout sketch.

I changed parts of this one, but only details. Some other pages look completely different from the sketches, but most of them actually followed my original intentions. Drawn with ballpoint pen on regular a4 (21x29,7cm) size paper. I filled in the blacks to be able to see the black/white proportions on the page, something I haven't really succeeded well enough at earlier. This is also the script, so you'll be able to see it transform too.

Ink.

This is what the finished inks looks like. I remade the sexscene a couple of times, but were never satisfied, so I used this one after all. The panel borders were made separately, since I didn't know what they were going to look like yet when I did this page. I seldom fill in all the blacks, since it's easier to do in Photoshop. Or it's as easy. I guess it's mostly a mental thing.

Finished page.

Final version... Notice Purple's headgear in panel one. I also fixed Information's arm in panels 2 and 3. Also, there's been some variations in the dialogue since the first version.

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PAGE 13.
Layout sketch.

I didn't sketch out the backgrounds here as much as I did on most of the other pages, which shows in the inks. this takes place in the lower sections of the city, so it's supposed too look dirtier, with another style of buildings and stuff, but I don't know if it shows. It isn't that important to the story, so it doesn't matter much anyway.

Ink.

I changed the panel layout a little, which might have been a mistake, but I think it will work better when you see it opposite to page 12. This was supposed to have been page 12 by the way, but I added a page, so now it's page 13. All the inked pages were made on paper I had cut into C'est Bon format (20x26cm). Didn't cost me anything extra. It's a good store for art material. Anyway, it felt much better to work on paper that was the right size from the beginning. A mental thing, but important nonetheless. It also helped me to draw the panel borders before I started drawing. Panel 6 was never supposed to look like this. I knew right away that it was going to fail, so I consciously fucked it up just to do something there. Then I took a break.

Finished page.

I hope you can read the text, because it has changed quite a bit from the script. The font is a lot smaller than I had made room for, so I modified it for this reason as well as others. I rewrote parts of the dialogue on this page maybe four times, until I was happy with it. I also redrew panels 3 and 5-7. The characters and background in panel 6 were drawn on two separate papers. There's a lot of text here, but I think it works. At least I hope so. Parts of it were changed because later parts of the big story were more clear to me than when I wrote the original script. The entire story was originally going to be roughly about 10x20 pages. Now it seems more likely the total page count will end at something like 300 pages, if that is enough. I have a pretty good idea what will happen in parts 2, 3, 5 and 6, and I have ideas for part 4 and one that will come much later, like part 8 or something. The closer I get to the future, the clearer it gets. My biggest problem will be to find the time for all this and a life at the same time.

Mattias Elftorp, jan 27 2003