Drawing What a Character Doesn't Notice

A quiet scene, four clues, and the problems hiding between the panels.

A cook going home. A jacket over a chair. A chef who cannot think of a recipe. A scent in a corridor that has to be on the page and must not be noticed.

That is the whole of sequence five of Vincent and the Vanishing Pot, and it took us longer than anything else in the book so far.

It is one room at the end of a long day. Vincent talks to a young cook working late and gets a sense that something is off, and lets it pass. He crosses the room, catches a smell on a jacket left over a chair, and lets that pass too. Then he sits down with his recipe book to work out what to do with a new spice he has just brought home, and nothing comes. That has never happened to him before. And on his way out, something drifts in from the corridor and he half catches it and goes home anyway.

Nobody argues. Nobody chases anybody. Four times the scene hands him something and four times he sets it down, and the reader has to catch every one of them while Vincent catches none.

That turned out to be far harder then we had thought.

Why this one was hard

Most of what we have drawn so far has been the big flashy sequences. Action, something to point the camera at, a reason for the eye to move. This one is a small drama scene in one room, and there is more going on inside it than in any of them.

Action is easier to draw, and there is no shame in saying so. A chase is loud enough to carry a weak layout. Small moments in one room have nothing to hide behind, and this one has more than one job to do on top of that. It is setup, and it is laying clues, quietly enough that you get them on a second read rather than a first.

And underneath all of it was the question we kept coming back to: how do you tell the story of a character missing the clues without slowing everything down with too many panels? If the read becomes too slow, you risk losing your reader. We needed enough time for each clue to land, but not so much that the story stopped moving.

That became the balancing act. The reader has to notice enough to tuck the clue away, but not so much that Vincent looks foolish for walking past it. And we had to do that four times in one room.

Every adjustment to one clue changed how the others felt.

This scene has four story points, so we thought it would be good to look at ending each beat at the end of a page and starting the next one at the top of the page after. My thinking was simple. These are eight to twelve year olds, and I was looking for ways to simplify it so it read well for that audience.

The staging is tied straight to that. Where Vincent is standing decides what the action can be. The action decides how many panels it needs. And the number of panels decides whether the beat can land at the bottom of the page.

If it can't, we have two choices. We go back and move Vincent, or we let the beat carry onto the next page and make that first panel strong enough to give the reader a moment to take it in.

Sometimes the page turn becomes part of the storytelling.

That loop is why this took so long. Every time we fixed one thing, we broke another. Each beat broke in a different way.

The room first

Before any of that could be staged, the room had to exist. This was a new location, so Dimitri started on paper, working out where the walls are, where the light comes from, and where a camera can actually sit.

This is the part Dimitri loves. He has a master’s degree in architecture from Belgrade, and it turns up on every page of this book.

He does not just draw a room. He works out how the room is built, where everything belongs, and how we can move through it. Then he can draw it from wherever the story needs us to be standing. Once the room exists in his head and on paper, almost any angle becomes possible, and nothing drifts from one panel to the next.

For Dimitri, building the room is part of telling the story.

That is what made the rest of this possible, because nearly every fix below is a change of angle.

Beat one: saying one thing and meaning another

The young cook is not telling Vincent the whole truth. The reader needs to feel that. Vincent, who is standing right there, does not.

Dialogue cannot do this on its own, because anything written plainly enough for a reader to catch is plain enough that Vincent would catch it too. So we split the job between two panels. The main panel is over the cook’s shoulder, on his face, carrying what he says. Beside it, small, a second angle from behind him, carrying what he means.

Two angles on one moment, one for the line and one for the truth under it. The reader gets both. Vincent is only in the room for the first one.

Beat two: getting across the room

The second beat happens at a chair, and for a while we could not find a reason for Vincent to be near it that did not feel like the story pushing him there.

The answer was to move him earlier. We restaged him to a different part of the work table, so that when he crosses to his recipe book the chair is on the way. He is not going to the jacket. He is going to the book, and the jacket is between him and it. Which also means the move into the third beat and the whole of the second beat are the same move. One walk, two jobs, no page spent getting him anywhere.

Getting him past the chair was the easy half. The hard half was the emotion.

Vincent has to catch the smell and decide it is nothing. At first, we kept trying to make the moment smaller so he could plausibly walk past it. But everything became mush. Either the smell didn't register, or Vincent looked like he simply wasn't paying attention.

Then we realized we had it backwards.

Vincent picks up the jacket and the page shows exactly what he smells. Not a trace of it. All of it, drawn as shape and colour across half the panel. He even names it out loud.

Then he puts the jacket down and carries on.

That was what we had been getting wrong. He doesn't miss the clue. He notices it completely and sets it aside.

And somehow, watching him do that is far more interesting.

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Beat three: drawing someone failing to think of something

This was the hard one. Vincent has brought home a new spice and for the first time in his life nothing comes to him. That is a feeling with no action in it at all, and it sits at the end of a sequence that is already quiet.

What the page has to say is an absence, and Vincent has never had one. No smell vision. The obvious way to draw that is to give him one and let it fade or disappear, and that is not the same thing at all. A smell that goes away is still a smell. He is getting nothing. 

We started with Vincent holding the book and realized that what we needed was a down shot on the recipe book. Vincent writing pairings and crossing them out. Citrus. Citrus, chocolate. Citrus, chocolate, cinnamon. All scratched through.

That does two jobs in the same panels. It tells you the pairings are not working, and it tells you nothing is coming to him, which is the point of the beat.

That turned the dullest stretch in the sequence into the one that tells you the most about him, and it cost no extra pages. It is the single best thing we did on this one.

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Beat four: and then the door

Late on, we realised the door had to be in frame twice, and close together. Once for a scent coming in from the corridor, once for Vincent leaving. That is a staging constraint nobody thinks about until the layout is nearly finished, and it sent us back through the whole page arrangement.

The scent is a plant. It does not pay off for a long while yet, and it has to be present, because a plant nobody registers is not a plant. It also has to be almost nothing, because the moment a reader is sure something matters they stop reading the scene and start waiting for the answer.

We drew it obviously the first time. It was the wrong call and the page said so straight away. The scent read as the point of the panel, and Vincent standing next to it doing nothing read as a man ignoring the plot.

So we worked on it. The scent got reduced and moved to the edge of frame. The door had been closed, and we had to open it, because the scent needed somewhere to come from. Vincent is turned toward us, so he does not see it but senses something, and we gave him a line that pulls his attention a little further away.

He does not clock it. The reader gets it on a second pass.

His exit was originally two panels and neither was doing much. We combined them into one long panel: we added a yawn, which tells you he is tired, he says he is going home, which tells you he is leaving, and the next panel is him clicking the lights off. Three pieces of information, one panel, no dialogue explaining any of it.

Which left us with the opposite problem. If the scent is that small, what makes the reader notice it?

We decided to stack the two doorway panels directly above each other, using the same angle both times. The same corner of the room lands in the same place on the page, so when the reader's eye returns there, something feels familiar even if they don't quite know why.

Film does this with time. You return to the same shot later and the audience feels the connection without necessarily knowing why.

A page has no time. It has position.

So position has to do the remembering.

Same work. Different form.

Sequence five is done for this rough stage, we may tweak it as we move through the stages but it is in the book. In the end a reader will go through it in about ninety seconds and never know any of this happened, which is exactly the job.

I also want to give a little nod here to KCU and the many masterclasses we've been lucky enough to attend.

We came to graphic novels from animation, and a lot of those storytelling skills came with us. But making a graphic novel has its own language. Page layouts, panel flow, dialogue balloons, lettering, page turns. There was a whole new craft for us to learn.

The KCU masterclasses opened that door. I've taken so much from those sessions, and somewhere along the way those lessons stopped being things I was learning and became things I now instinctively use while we're working.

It's funny to look at a page like this and realize how many people, conversations and lessons quietly find their way into the work.

In our next post we're going behind the scenes again, but this time we're looking at the bigger picture. How does a graphic novel actually get made, and what does our workflow look like?

Paper sketches, digital panels, a very important tracker, and 210 pages moving back and forth between two pairs of hands.

Next up, the workflow behind the pages.

By Annellie