Tomorrow, Jeffrey Brown’s new book Rey and Pals will be out from Chronicle Books and we had the opportunity to ask him a few questions. Enjoy!
What’s your creative process like? For example, do you start with a list of ideas for the jokes, or do you start with doodles or thumbnail sketches to develop the ideas.
I usually start with the ideas – for Rey and Pals, I came up with almost 200 initial ideas! Sometimes these start with a quote from one of the films and I need to figure out a situation to use it, or I might want to make a joke about a real life situation and figure out what scene from the film I could use to make the joke. Other times there’s something from the films I want to draw – like Maz’s castle with its menagerie of aliens – and I need to figure out a joke that might fit with it. These ideas are all drawn as tiny thumbnail sketches, which I then work with my editors at Chronicle and Lucasfilm to refine and flesh out before I start final artwork.
Which takes longer – drawing the pictures or coloring?
Usually the coloring; I can pencil maybe ten drawings in a day, and ink the linework of around seven. I usually aim to finish the coloring on four or five pages in a day. Sometimes the drawing takes longer – for some reason every time I try to draw the Millennium Falcon, it takes forever and there’s lots of erasing and restarting!
How long does the typical one page picture take versus the big two page spreads?
The two page spreads took about a full day each, except for the Maz’s castle spread, which took two days. I stayed up into the wee hours thinking I would finish it after coloring it all day, and still didn’t complete it until the next evening. Some of the pages which don’t have backgrounds go quite a bit faster, but the Jedi Master art class spread took longer.
Who is your favorite new character in the sequel trilogy?
I like so many of them, I don’t know if I could pick just one! I think I really like Rey and Finn together, they’re so fun together in The Force Awakens.
We want to thank Jeffrey for taking the time to answer our questions. You can find out more about him and his work at his official website Jeffrey Brown Comics. For more information on Rey and Pals, you can check out the official product page at Chronicle Books.