Everything I draw ends up wearing a bow-tie

4-18am asked: How far ahead into TPOH do you usually plan? Like, do you already know the story start to end, or do you find that you only have the outline of X amount of pages?? Or something else entirely?

not sure how to describe it: I know the story start to end, in the sense that always I knew how it began, how it would end, and most of the Big Stuff that Happens in the middle. However, over time I have shuffled some of the Middles around, and while now they’re in a pretty 99% set order I’m always willing to let the story say ‘actually mate we’re doing this bit now’ because this thing is the boss of me, not the other way around. Likewise I have certain pages all set out in my head, and have from the start, but on the whole I do thumbnails chapter by chapter so that I have a fluid visual narrative without trapping myself too far ahead of time. I also have to account for the fact that I’m still learning, and what I thumbnail now will not be as good as something I could thumbnail in the future, so forcing myself to thumbnail the whole comic before I started was never something I wanted to do, because I knew it would want to change it later and this story is so sodding long I would have had to wait like, 10 years to start.