Miss Endicott art hyper analysis header

How To Compose Panels by Fourquemin and Smulkowski

As I mentioned in my review of “Miss Endicott,” the art of Xavier Fourquemin with the coloring of Scarlett Smulkowski works so well because of its strong compositions and use of fundamental comic book storytelling techniques. It’s the kind of work that up-and-coming artists should study.

In this article, I want to guide you through some of those techniques. What draws the reader’s eye through the panel? What “tricks” do Fourquemin and Smulkowski use to take you where you need to go next? How do they use seemingly extraneous detail to layer an image and give it greater dimensionality?

You could write an entire book analyzing the techniques Fourquemin and Smulkowski show off here. For now, I’ll limit myself to handful of panels.

You’ll see through these examples why I’m naming the colorist as part of the art on this book. Her work is crucial in many of these techniques. “Miss Endicott” is a strong example of a book where the colorist and the artist shared a vision for the storytelling. They complement each other’s work so well that the whole is truly greater than the sum of the parts.

Composition at the Core

One of the reasons I love the original “The Matrix” movie so much is that every shot feels like a comic book panel. When I learned how much work Steve Skroce and Geoff Darrow did with the storyboards on the film, it all made sense.

There are countless, timeless tricks an artist can use to build a well-composed panel. The world of photography and movie making have taught us all countless principles and guidelines. Study either of those two worlds and you’ll find new ways of looking at comics.

Of course, it also helps to study comics, which has its own unique set of rules/techniques/restrictions.

When someone displays their control of the comics technique as strongly as Fourquemin does here, it’s worth noting, applauding, and learning.

Fourquemin is the type of artist whose every panel is composed, and I want to show you a few examples of that. We’ll start with this shot, where one character is being surrounded by other people who mean him harm.

A good example of strong panel composition from "Miss Endicott" by Xavier Fourquemin

The poor fellow is surrounded by three bad guys — a cluster of two to the right and one to the left. There’s a larger gap between the first and second bad guy to draw your eye into the good guy. It’s a framing technique.

Likewise, pay attention to the dark black areas and how they work. The rocks in the foreground to the right, the roof of carved out dirt above, and the two posts to either side frame him in. The bad guys are, likewise, nearly silhouetted. Only the one who is talking has any light shining on him. That helps guide the eye, too.

The silhouetted areas are all in the foreground. The background elements are all wide open. They have no solid black areas back there, except the shadow on the good guy’s back leg and under his coast. But his face — which is where human brains are trained to look — is wide open for the color, and bright

Ink lines play into this, too. Thicker lines tend to stand out, while thinner lines recede. The bad guys up front are drawn with thicker lines than the background, where things get thinner and sparser. We, likewise, lose detail as elements recede from the reader. That helps give something almost like a glow to the poor fellow who’s in trouble here.

Smulkowski’s colors also play a part in this. Look at how much brighter the colors are in the focal point of the panel. With all the silhouetted areas around that area, the lighter color draws your attention immediately. It’s a rule of photography, too: The eyes are always drawn to the area of greatest contrast. In this case, the colorist and the artist are both doing the same thing: Fewer black areas, fewer lines, brighter colors. They’re both on the same figurative page here.

The handlines of Miss Endicott

There are other “little” things working in this panel, too. The three hands we can see of the bad guys are all pointing towards the good guy.

Other points of interest: The bad guys are not all in a straight line. That would be boring. Instead, there’s a slight arc to their lineup, allowing them to be to the left, right, and above the good guy all at the same time.

Also, there’s an odd number of bad guys. Repetition always works best with odd numbers.

The eyelines of Miss Endicott

Follow the eye lines of characters. Here, we can only see three eyes in the panel, but given the way the heads are positioned, we can work out their eye lines. Your eye can’t help but follow those leading lines.

Everything leads the reader to the little guy in the middle there, over and over again.

Even the lettering works towards that. There’s a big area of negative space in the upper right corner where Fourquemin could have placed the singular word balloon. It would not have worked as well, though. With its current position, that balloon stops the eye over the point of focus in the panel. You don’t read across to the right for the lettering and then have to shift your eyes back to the left to see what’s going on. It’s all in front of you in the panel.

The lettering helps to frame the little guy along with the two bad guys on the left and the rock at the bottom of the panel.

It looks like such a simple panel at first. It’s a very small bit of story, but Fourquemin and Smulkowski work hard to compose the clearest panel of storytelling possible.

Credit for Colorist Scarlett Smulkowski

Smulkowski does an impressive job of coloring this book in what are often drab and dingy colors, and yet lighting up every scene to make things easier to read, and to tell the story.

This book takes place in Victorian England. You picture the dirt or cobblestone roads, the soot-filled air, the brown buildings and the clothes that are mostly darker earthy colors — browns, grays, blacks, and the occasional spot of navy blue.

Smulkowski manages those colors, their saturation levels, and their brightness levels in a way that complements the art and keeps all of the layers of art separated. It’s Comics Coloring 101 on display here, and we’ll get more into some of it in the next section.

The other thing I didn’t realize until after I finished reading the book is how many digital coloring effects she uses. At first, the book seems pretty flat. There aren’t that many colors, after all, and the eye is kept busy soaking up all the details.

You don’t notice how Smulkowski swoops in with all her gradients and with some well-positioned highlight brushes to bring life and dimension to the page. So many of the “tricks” that she uses in this book have been overused by other colorists that the knee jerk reaction is to hate how “fake” and inorganic everything looks. That’s not true here.

A sample of Scarlett Smulkowski's coloring over Xavier Fourquemin's art in "Miss Endicott"

Take a look at this detail from a panel that takes up about half of one tier of art in the book. You can see what I’m talking about when I mention that this is drab-looking London, with dreary earth-toned buildings, some faded brickwork, and wood work that’s yet to show its age.

Look more carefully. Check out the light coming through those windows from inside the house. It has that bright orange color from a fireplace or a ridiculously strong set of candles. Look into the window frames to see how the light reaches past the windows and shines in the exterior window sill and arch. It even spills out a bit onto the front of the building, though the temperature has cooled off to a bluer shade of white.

Look more closely at the light inside the house. It’s brighter yellow towards the center of the house, and a cooler orange at the outside edges and on top. That gives you a better idea that the source of the light is in the middle of that house, not off to either side.

That’s not important to the plot, or anything, but does show you the level of thought that went into all the little details in the coloring of this book. Smulkowski is keeping things consistent with the art. It makes sense that the light would have that source.

Look at those steps in front of the house, where the highlights hit the edges of the stairs. The cobblestone ground off to the left has some green-toned highlights to it. I wonder if that’s just a reflection from something just off-panel, or maybe an indication of moss growing between the stones? Or — and pardon my lack of color awareness here — does orange light reflecting off brown start looking green?

Notice how the right side of the building has a brighter look than the left side, which is the “shady” side. I’ll show you more about that in the next section, too, because this is part of a larger panel and sequence of panels that’s filled with great composition and storytelling.

If there’s anything that might be improved with this panel, it might be a greater contrast between the lit and the shaded halves of this building. If you brought this panel down to gray tones, you’d see there’s not a huge difference in tonal values. It’s there, for sure, but could probably have been pushed further.

That said, too many colorists go for that and give the final art a murky look that sucks the joy out of the art, which is tough to make out from the deep shade. I’ll take “err on the side of readability” as the right solution every time.

Finally, look far off into the background, towards the brush strokes in the sky in the far off background. That adds a bit of texture and a faint clue as to the hour of the day and the quality of the sky. It’s murky and polluted, with the sun being low and the clouds staying high.

There’s a lot of information in just that one panel, some of which might not be necessary for the plot and some of which you won’t ever “notice.” However, you will “see” it. Your mind will take in the time of day from the sky and the exterior source of lighting from the outside of the building. You might not actively think about it, but it’s there and you still see it.

Storytelling and Line of Sight

Now let’s take a look at one storytelling trick that I was in awe of, once I realized what’s happening. It’s a simple top half of a page where Miss Endicott is walking through town. Fourquemin is showing us some of the local architecture along the way. But watch the path Endicott travels.

Miss Endicott draws the long and winding road

That first tier is one big panel that Fourquemin sliced in half to indicate a small passage in time. (Scott McCloud taught us all about how the gutter is a jump in time in “Understanding Comics.”)

Your eye jumps to the left side of the next tier, naturally, and will follow one of two paths across the panel. Either you’ll read across the buildings and bridges between them across the page, or you’ll follow the walking path that bends in front of the buildings and then around to the underpass. Either way, your eye is drawn to Miss Endicott.

She stands out because she’s framed by the natural arch of the overpass, and because her solid blue is different from the relatively lighter-toned colors in that area.

My eye followed the walking path, by the way. It’s so wide open at the start that it drew my attention, and then my eyes went down the stairs and across to that curve on the right side of the panel. A natural curve like this walking path is attractive to a reader, particularly when placed around an architectural feature with straight(er) lines.

I like how the details on the cobblestone on the far left break apart as they approach the silhouetted fence in the extreme foreground in the bottom left corner there. It really helps to add a layer of distance between the two.

Framing The Panel, and Free Motion

Let’s look at the way Fourquemin and Smulkowski guide your eye through a single panel. In this panel, the focal point is Miss Endicott and Evan walking into the park:

Miss Endicott and Evan walk into the park

Again, we see elements in the extreme foreground to the mid ground to the distant background. Fourquemin is always playing with layers.

We see the characters of interest framed by the opening in the fence they’re taking to enter the park.

The only “empty” part of the panel is the small clearing that Miss Endicott and Evan are walking towards. It’s a photographer’s trick here, too: Don’t have your character walking into the edge of a picture. If they’re on the move, leave space for them to move into, unless the purpose of your picture is to show them at a stop or confined in some way. The same holds true here.

In our mind, we’re walking those two characters into that clearing. That’s the direction they’re facing and there’s nothing in their way. It’s the clearest part of the panel. We can’t help but fill that motion in. For the artist it’s an extra bit of motion in the drawing that they don’t have to do. They get it for free for setting the panel up correctly.

The park bench slats create leading lines that draw your eye right over to Miss Endicott and Evan:

Park bench slats lead the eye to the focal point of the panel, Miss Endicott, with art by Fourquemin

The greenery in the foreground is almost a giant pointer to Endicott. Outline the grass and the bushes and you’ll draw yourself a tidy triangle that points right at the characters. It also works because they’re the only green items in the panel, so they stand out against a sea of drab brown buildings and brick walls. That’s how Smulkowski adds to the storytelling here.

Endicott’s blue dress jumps right out at you. It’s the only example of that color in the panel. This is a trick Fourquemin and Smulkowski use often in the book. Her dark blue coat always stands out in front of sickly green backgrounds, brown buildings, and even green parks.

Smulkowski also keeps the background pushed back by desaturating the colors there. Not that there’s too many super bright or super saturated colors in this panel besides Endicott’s dress, but the elements in the foreground have more solid colors with a bigger contract between their highlights and shadows. The range in the far background is much lesser.

She is following Fourquemin’s lead here, too. It’s just natural atmospheric distancing — the further away something gets, the less clear and detailed it will look. That’s shown with the density and the weight of the ink lines.

Fourquemin uses thicker lines in the foreground and thinner as the scene pushes back. By the time you get to the buildings in the extreme background, they’re small scratches of lines barely outlining faded, desaturated gray buildings.

OK, So It’s Not All Perfect

It will surprise very few long time readers to find out that I have a lettering quibble. I explain it in the above video, but here’s a full breakdown of it:

I like the font. The square balloons are fine. I like their rough, often uneven design with a variety of tail shapes. The original French edition of the book is hand lettered, so I’m assuming the word balloons and tails were done by hand, as well.

But this one panel jumped out at me for a particularly reason that I’d bet 99% of you would never catch. It’s in the way the art and the lettering interacts, and it’s all about the overlap:

The layering of the lettering in this panel from "Miss Endicott" v1 is a minor quibble, but I still don't like it.

It starts with two balloons at the top that provide the room noise. Those are the random voices of random characters who are surrounding Miss Endicott here. The first one is overlapped by Miss Endicott, pushing it into the background, where the voices are coming from.

After that, we see two balloons linked to two specific people. This is where my problem lies: The balloons don’t overlap in relation to the characters. That is, the nearest character’s balloon is tucked in behind the word balloon of the character who is behind him.

That’s a disconnect to my eyes. The reading order of the balloons is great. I love the way they snake around. I like how those last three balloons overlaps to guide the eye in the right direction.

But I hate how the overlap makes no sense in the last case. That one should be behind all the others and everything would be just fine.

No, wait, that wouldn’t fix everything yet, either. That third balloon is placed behind the second balloon. But the second one is a voice from the distance, and the third comes out of the mouth of the guy in the foreground. They’re overlapping in the wrong order.

Even worse, the last speaker’s body is clearly in front of Miss Endicott. His hand and the front of his face are clearly seen in front of her. Yet, his word balloon is tucked behind her.

There are a lot of mixed messages in this panel’s lettering.

That all said, the composition of the art in the panel is well done. Endicott is looking down and to the right at the three people she’s interacting with. The lettering runs in that direction, too.

That look on Miss Endicott’s face is great, too. She’s out of her element, underground, and surrounded by all manner of strange creature, many of whom could be seen as threatening. (A couple of pages later, they get very threatening.) She remains calm, cool, and confident, even as they’re sizing her up and obsessing over everything about her, down to the gloves. She’s almost bemused that these Forgotten people think they could begin to scare her. That wide-eyed half-smile is perfect. They don’t know about the knitting needles up her sleeve — !

The Word of the Day is “Composition”

Putting aside to the lettering thing, if there’s something I could leave you with after these last 2500 words, it’s one word: “Composition”

Yes, there is a page composition. It’s important that the reading order of the panels makes sense and your eye flows fluidly from panel to panel. (Don’t stack panels on the left is a classic case for this.)

But also look inside each panel. Is it just a character standing there talking? Or is there more going on in the panel? Do the things and the other people surrounding that character guide your eye in some way? Is the color attracting you to what should be the focal point of the panel?

Can you stack multiple techniques together to accomplish more in a single drawing – maybe establish a scene, guide the reader’s eye to the right part of it, and lead the reader’s eye along the way. All at the same time?

Fourquemin and Smulkowski do an excellent job in answering all of those questions in every panel of this book. They use every tool in the storytelling tool belt to tell their story, and the results are very satisfying.


What do YOU think? (First time commenters' posts may be held for moderation.)