Ryan Maloney draws a page of his graphic novel The Night My Bed Turned into a Submarine in Procreate, building it layer by layer from rough sketch to final ink. He compares drawing to sport: muscle memory, daily practice, repetition. He uses references from Amulet and other comics, keeps each panel to one clear narrative point, and makes facial expressions into crystal-clear shapes so kids understand the emotion.
Chapters
Early morning drawing sesh. I'm trying to draw one page of The Night My Bed Turned into a Submarine before my kids wake up. Drawing everything in Procreate as usual, building it in pages, and I'm keeping Amulet nearby, another graphic novel, to remind me of the level of professionalism that I'm aiming for. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with sports and art, specifically baseball and football. I used to play baseball baseball all day, then go home and watch baseball. And while it was on TV, I would draw all the characters and all the team logos and make drawings for all my friends and my brothers. I used to use baseball on TV as a reference for how good I should be playing on the field. To me, there was no difference between sports and art. They were the exact same. The more repetitions you got on the field, the better you became. So I took that over to drawing, and that's I told myself, you know, the more drawings that I make, the better I'm gonna get. You did. Making this graphic novel is a huge challenge. Every single day I sit down and I don't know what I'm doing. I think you can play through with this too in the morning. I use references, I pull ideas from other movies, books, and stories, and I just try to piece it together page by page. One thing you can do as you're drawing is overcomplicate things and overcomplicate the story. So I'm focusing on keeping one main point per panel and making sure the story is extremely clear and easy to follow.
Wait, whoever hit the ball over the stadium?
Barry Bonds?
Luke! Luke, did you draw that? It's the second person that did it.
A couple people did it. San Francisco. What I do is build up rough, rough, rough sketches, several layers on top of each other until I start to see where I can place the final line. I don't use the same frames and panels for every single drawing, but I am starting to template it a little bit. I remember hearing musician Jack White talk about when he's making music, he doesn't want things to be easy. He doesn't want his studio to be clean. He doesn't want to be able to find his instruments easily. He wants it all to be a struggle. He wants to hear that in the music, and it definitely comes out in the music. So I want that to come out in my art. What number are you? 9. 9, I remember 9. Drawing with kids around is pretty interesting. You get about 30 seconds of drawing work before you get interrupted. But in this case, it's a weekend, so I'm fine with it. They get to watch me draw and make things. And I get to work the ideas in that I hear in the room into my story. You could, you could make a human. I could. They give me ideas all the time. All right, once the rough sketch is done, we move to black line using Studio Pen in Procreate. Now you just need to commit to the line. You can go back and clean it up and erase it, but you can't get scared here. You got to start putting down the final line, the final expression, make it— the drawings as funny and as clear as possible. A toy executive once gave me a tip when I was designing a toy line. It was so simple, but I had never heard it before. I can't believe I'd never— I've been designing for so many years, I had never thought of it. He said, "Make sure the expressions on the face of the characters are perfectly clear." "The mouse turned into ears!" "The end of my life." "We're gonna hit sky." "If a character's happy, make sure it's exaggeratedly, if that's a word, happy. If a character's angry, make him angry. But make those emotions crystal clear so a kid or the reader or the viewer can see that instantly. That simplifies everything. If you're just doing a character pose and you can't tell what mood the character is in, there's not going to be any emotion conveyed in that scene or in that toy or in that book, whatever you're doing. To me, art really is a sport. It challenges me every single day. It's something I like to do every single day, 365 days a year. I don't like to take days off. Not to sound like a tough guy, I just like to get better and better and better at things, and it's constant entertainment to watch my hand draw things that my brain doesn't think is possible to do. Sort of like if you got really good at the guitar, your fingers would just start to do the playing and you could sort of sit back and watch after you have that muscle memory. On the days I don't feel like drawing, I don't feel like creating, which is at least half of the days of the year. I just remind myself that it's all a sport, and the way to get better is just go back to the basics.
