Turning Your Book Into A Graphic Novel

Turning Your Book Into A Graphic Novel                By Jacqueline S Miller

I'm writing a couple of Fantasy novels about time travel and magic. I enjoy reading books with illustrations and often draw pictures of the characters and scenes in my own works in progress (WIP's) for inspiration.

I'd been experimenting with adding text and captions to some drawings for the books and wondered whether I should story board the book in order to sort out my very complicated plot.

Then, about a week ago, I suddenly thought that, maybe, I could turn the WIP into a Graphic Novel.

Here is my  preliminary drawing for a scene where the art teacher, Simon, meets a new pupil.

 Simon enters his studio and is surprised to find Amelie there. He suspects that she has been snooping around but he does not mind as he thinks she is the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. He even forgives her when he discovers that she has stolen some playing cards used in his conjuring tricks, as all he can think about is how much he wants to paint her portrait. He would be very upset and surprised to learn that she is a spy and a deadly assassin!

The drawing is in pencil and was drawn freestyle from my imagination. I hope that Simon's frock coat is authentic as I researched what a Victorian gentleman would wear. Of course, he could have been wearing his artist's smock but I think he looks smarter in this!

In this picture you can see my notebook.  I cropped the drawing and  added speech bubbles. I referred to the text from my first draft of the chapter. This is going to be edited as I can see that the dialogue for a Graphic Novel, differs from the text in a normal novel. Telling a story in dialogue, pictures and captions requires different skills to just writing a book.

This was the first time I'd used the app so I'm pleased with the result.

Here, I've added a template, a heading and a caption. I used an Apple Ipad and an app to do this. As there are pictures, I don't need the caption which describes what Simon is wearing.

Now I've added colour. Amelie is described in the book as being tall with pale blue eyes and white blonde hair.

I've returned to the original drawing as I want the colours to be uniform. I may redo the template using this drawing.

Here, I've used the app to crop the picture to fit the template.  I now need to write the script. Writing a comic or graphic novel requires different skills to writing a normal novel.

I'm going to experiment with using my Wacom on the PC to make the deep colours you get in comics.

However, I quite like the soft sepia colour of the original drawings. I suppose I could use both styles.

I'm editing the actual chapter in the book which this accompanies.  I plan to post it later.

Copyright Jacqueline S Miller