Katie Fricas - Checked Out

Here's a page from my book Checked Out, where the main character, the brunette on the left named Louise, gets an unexpected visit at her library job from an ex, Wanda, the redhead. 

I have a weird relationship with panels. I tend to start drawing a page with an idea in mind, then I try to make what I am thinking appear. A few doodles get formalized, and then if panels need to go in, I'll add them later. Other times, it is very soothing to draw the panels first and fill them in, so I'll do that. 

I keep a separate sketchbook as a style guide for Checked Out. It has character sketches, lettering, story ideas, color schemes, and panel layouts in it. I'll go through some of my favorite comics and do quick little pencil drawings of the layouts I like. I pick about a dozen or so. Then, I reference them when I feel like a page with panels is coming up. 

Some comics whose panel layouts I mimicked in order to find my own for Checked Out were: a Spongebob comic with had an aerial shot of a bedroom that I really liked; Denys Wortman's New York, edited by James Sturm and Brandon Elston, which is basically a textbook on perspective, and Vanessa Davis's Make Me a Woman. 

This page is a simple layout: three rectangle boxes stacked. Things are salty between the two characters, so they are at opposite sides of the page from each other. The colors - Louise's yellow blouse and Wanda's shag - are over-saturated and hurt a bit, like the moment itself. The dialogue is crunched in the middle of the page, tense between them.

The characters are in the library against a backdrop of books. Shelves like these appear a lot, I drew them over and over and over. I decided not to outline books in the book in black - they're all just watercolor blobs. 

It's also important that Louise gets the last word on this page - a table-turning moment for these two.