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Imagine your stories with the five senses, before turning them into comics

The sensory power to create convincing comic worlds

Have you ever felt that your comics lack something, but you can’t identify what it is? Have you noticed how some comic pages transport you completely to another world, while others barely manage to keep you interested? The difference could be in something as fundamental as the evocation of the senses.

Have you ever created a travel sketchbook? In it, you note your experiences and impressions, as well as the way you interpret the images around you. That is, it combines image, text, design, and fantasy. What you’re trying to do is somehow capture the experiences you’re having, taking something from the trip with you. So that when you’re back, time passes and you open the notebook again, you’re somehow transported back to that place and moment.

Pay attention to this last concept, that of the moment. You might be able to return to the place, perhaps even in reality. In fact, let’s do the following: imagine that you do, you actually return to the place you visited. Also imagine that you brought your notebook, the travel sketchbook you made last time. Being there, you open it.

Suddenly you find yourself transported anyway, you’re taken back to your previous trip; despite being there in person, live, the sketchbook contains your perspective of the place the last time you visited it, and that perspective has now changed. It doesn’t just hold the images, or the data, but also what it was like for you to feel a certain specific way there, at that moment and in that place.

Do you understand what happened in this little mental experiment, do you understand the power of narrative, worldbuilding, and chronicling? Well, I hope you do, because these are essential tools for the comics you’ll create from now on, even (and I would say, especially) those that are fictional.

It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a medieval empire on Mars at the end of the 1960s: your comic will take us on a journey there, and if you play your cards right, you can make us experience being there with the same intensity as if we were opening one of your travel sketchbooks. Keep reading to learn about the importance of creating comics based on your five senses. And, in fact, you know what? Some other senses too. Because not everything is limited to sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell.

Total immersion: Turn your mind into a living stage

One of the biggest mistakes a comic artist can make is not imagining their comic in terms of a comic. You knew that, right? More than once we imagine our stories as if they were a movie, and then we struggle to make what we wanted to narrate fit into this static, soundless medium (but for that very reason so magical, let’s say it; it’s not a defect, it’s a feature).

Okay, that’s true, but let me bring you, today, an equally important maxim: another of the biggest mistakes a comic artist can make is to only imagine their story on the pages of a comic. You must start by seeing it in the reality of your mind!

Before putting any image on paper, before breaking down the events into panels and dialogues, make sure you have very clear notions about what happened, and not only that, but about what it was like to be there. Take the trouble to imagine that you’re talking about a real, factual event, which you have only afterward turned into a comic.

Yours is a fictionalization, a memory, a travel diary, and it’s your job to try to ensure that when reading the story, the reader is transported there. Don’t skimp on production costs in the theater of your mind: the smells, the tastes, every sound, how each texture felt on each character’s skin, everything can serve as material for the garden of wonders that is your imagination.

And not only that: also what the temperature was like, what the humidity was like, how each character perceived the passage of time. And, why not, what did each one’s sense of balance tell them? What was the inclination of the terrain like, how heavy (or how light) did their clothes, their objects, their bodies, their bones feel to each of them?

If at the time of creating the comic you must go through a small moment of grief, if you can’t help but lament some aspects of this mental reality that you couldn’t convey with the resources given to you by the language of comics, it means you’re doing something right. Let your comics be, all of them, from the first to the last, pale reflections of those you dreamed in your mind! Shadows, ghosts, that will still shine, believe me, standing out among those made by others who only think in terms of comics.

The smell of ink: How senses build complete worlds

Think for a moment about your favorite comics. What do they have in common? It’s probably the ability to create a world so vivid that you can almost feel it. This doesn’t happen by accident. The great masters of comics instinctively understand that a convincing story appeals to all the senses.

Will Eisner, one of the fathers of modern comics, used weather and architecture as characters in themselves. When you read “A Contract with God,” you don’t just see the Bronx of the 1930s, but you can feel the oppressive humidity of summer, smell the streets after the rain, and hear the bustle of street vendors. Eisner understood that each panel should be a complete sensory window.

Similarly, when Craig Thompson draws snow in “Blankets,” he makes you feel the cold chilling your bones, hear the crunch under your feet, and experience the almost supernatural stillness of a snowy landscape. Thompson doesn’t just draw snow; he makes you feel it.

And what about aromas? Think about how Juanjo Guarnido in “Blacksad” makes you almost smell the cheap perfume in a jazz bar, or the stale tobacco in a detective’s office. He does it through visual textures, carefully selected color palettes, and environmental details that convey complete sensory information.

Creating a sensory experience doesn’t necessarily mean overloading with details. Sometimes, it’s more effective to suggest than to explicitly show. A character wrinkling their nose at an unpleasant smell can be more powerful than an elaborate textual description. A close-up of trembling hands holding a hot cup can convey environmental cold better than drawing a frozen thermometer in detail.

Mastering this aspect of sequential art will allow you to create worlds that your readers will not only see, but feel on all levels. Discover practical tools here to develop your sensory creativity and take your comics to a completely new level of immersion.

Fieldwork: Exploring with all senses

You must also, of course, do explorations, research, scouting. It’s best if you do it firsthand: that you yourself go to a place, any place, and note what it feels like to be there. You can make lists: all the sounds you heard over 15 minutes, then all the words (they’re not always the same), then aromas, and so on.

You can then ask yourself, lists in hand, how you would tell some of these impressions in a comic. Drawings, lines that suggest what they are? Words on the page? Supporting texts, narrations that extend beyond the typical “meanwhile”? What about using a character’s narrative voice, or even better, their thought bubbles?

“When I arrived at the train station, I was surprised by how the wood at the ticket office had accumulated mold” can be a great introduction to a scene, and also allow you to use the drawing to show other aspects of the station. (That is, you don’t need to show the ticket office if you’re already describing it in the text. Or, at least, you don’t need to show the mold).

You can also take advantage of a great benefit, which is including an emotion in addition to a description, in an observation that delivers two for the price of one. (In the case of my example, the emotion was surprise. Would you ever think that the character spends many of his afternoons at that station? Of course not, but how do you know if I didn’t tell you? You see, how easy it is, it’s just a matter of showing him surprised by a fact that would be well known to anyone who spent all their days there. Could we do the same if the narrator was the person selling tickets at the booth?)

It doesn’t matter if your story takes place in a bar and you only have access to a nearby park, the important thing is to get out of your house! (Although, thinking about it a bit, you can also do this exercise at home…)

Sensory memory: Your personal library of experiences

There is an invaluable resource that every artist possesses and that often remains unexploited to its full potential: sensory memory. This is the personal library of experiences you have accumulated throughout your life, each labeled with rich and detailed sensory information.

When you need to draw a character walking on the hot sand of a beach, turn to your own experience. Do you remember how they took short, quick steps? How they lifted their feet exaggeratedly? The facial expression of discomfort mixed with determination? These are not things you can effectively research on Google.

Similarly, when you want to convey the feeling of a rainy day, turn to your memories. How does light change during a storm? How does people’s behavior change? What sounds predominate and which ones disappear? How does humidity affect different textures?

There is a particularly useful exercise to develop this library: sensory reconstruction. Choose a vivid memory and spend time mentally reconstructing it, focusing specifically on the sensory aspects. For example, if you remember a childhood trip to the beach:

  • Sight: What exact color was the sea that day? How did light play on the waves?
  • Hearing: How did the waves sound as they broke? Were there seagulls? How did your voice sound under the sun?
  • Touch: How did the sand feel between your fingers? The contrast between skin warmed by the sun and cold water?
  • Smell: What did it smell like? Salt? Sunscreen? Seaweed?
  • Taste: Do you remember the salty taste on your lips? Did you eat something special that day?

If you regularly practice this type of reconstruction, you’ll be sharpening a crucial tool for your work as a comic artist. Your ability to evoke and transmit sensory experiences will significantly improve, and your stories will gain depth and credibility.

Want to explore practical methods to enrich your characters with sensory experiences? Visit this link for inspiration and discover exercises that will expand your creative repertoire.

The balance between showing and suggesting: Sensory economy

In the world of comics, where space is limited and each panel must count, learning to balance what you show and what you suggest is fundamental. This “sensory economy” is what separates efficient visual narrators from redundant ones.

Consider, for example, how Frank Miller in “Sin City” uses extreme black and white contrasts not only as a visual style, but as a way to communicate tactile and thermal sensations. When we see Marv walking in the snow, the brutal contrast between the blackness of his figure and the absolute white of the environment immediately conveys the cutting cold, without needing to show his condensed breath or explain it through text.

At the other end of the spectrum, Moebius (Jean Giraud) uses meticulous and detailed lines to create worlds where you can almost feel every texture, from the roughness of a stone wall to the softness of an exotic fabric. His attention to detail is not gratuitous, but a deliberate way of transmitting sensory information.

Both approaches are valid, but the crucial thing is to understand that you don’t need to communicate everything. Sometimes, a single drop of sweat on a character’s forehead can convey more about the stifling heat of a room than an elaborate description or multiple visual indicators.

This economy also extends to how you distribute sensory information throughout your narrative. Perhaps in one scene you focus on sounds, in another on smells, and in a third on textures. You don’t have to activate all the senses on every page or scene; in fact, doing so could overwhelm the reader.

Learn to prioritize which sense is most relevant for each moment of your story. Is it a scene where the taste of a meal changes the protagonist’s life? Then focus your attention on conveying that gustatory experience. Is it a moment of tension where sudden silence forebodes danger? Then hearing (or its absence) should take center stage.

This selective distribution not only makes your narration more effective, but also creates rhythm and variety in the reading experience. Click here to discover resources that will help you master this sensory balance and apply it effectively in your next stories.

Narrative synesthesia: When one sense evokes another

Synesthesia, that phenomenon where one sense involuntarily evokes another (like “seeing” colors when hearing music), can be a powerful narrative tool in your comics. Although not everyone experiences synesthesia neurologically, we can all take advantage of its principles to create richer sensory connections in our stories.

Consider how David Mack in “Kabuki” uses visual textures, spilled watercolors, and collage to convey not only images, but tactile sensations and emotional states. When you see a page by Mack, you don’t just observe it; you can almost feel its texture, smell the materials, hear the whisper of the brushstrokes. It’s a multisensory experience triggered by purely visual stimuli.

To implement this concept in your work, think about multisensory associations. For example:

  • Warm colors (reds, oranges) not only represent visual heat, but can evoke tactile sensations of warmth, spicy smells, or hot flavors.
  • Wavy or vibrant lines can suggest movement, but also undulating or liquid sounds.
  • Marked contrasts not only affect visually, but can convey physical tension, contrasting flavors, or abrupt temperature changes.

A particularly effective technique is the “cross-sensory metaphor,” where you express one sense through another. For example, you could show a deafening sound through a panel where all visual elements are distorted or fragmented. Or you could represent a nauseating smell through wavy green lines emanating from the object, even affecting the shape of the panels or texts.

This technique works because our brain already establishes these connections naturally. When we see something that looks rough, our brain simulates that tactile sensation even though we’re only receiving visual information. Your job as a comic artist is to take advantage of these pre-existing connections and use them deliberately.

The great Japanese manga masters have perfected this art, especially in genres like gastronomic. Think about how “The Gourmet” or “Oishinbo” make you almost taste the dishes represented only with black ink on paper. They achieve this not only through precise visual details, but by creating an entire sensory choreography that activates multiple senses simultaneously.

The invisible senses: Beyond the five traditional senses

When we talk about sensory experience, we tend to limit ourselves to the five traditional senses. However, human beings possess many more sensory systems that can greatly enrich your comics.

Consider, for example, proprioception: that sense that allows you to know where each part of your body is without needing to look at it. It’s what allows you to type without looking at your fingers or bring food to your mouth without spilling it. In your comics, you can take advantage of this sense to convey how a character perceives their own body in space. An expert warrior moving in perfect harmony versus a clumsy teenager who is still adapting to his accelerated growth will have radically different proprioceptive experiences.

Equally important is the sense of balance or vestibular system. Think about how to convey the sensation of vertigo when looking from a tall building, the disorientation after a blow, or the strange floating in zero gravity. Artists like Dave McKean have experimented with distortion of perspective and unbalanced compositions to convey these altered states of balance.

Another fascinating sense is interoception: the perception of internal body sensations. This includes heartbeat, breathing, hunger, thirst, body temperature. When a character is terrified, they don’t just show specific facial expressions; they also experience an increased heart rate, accelerated breathing, muscle tension. Conveying these internal sensations can add a layer of authenticity to your emotional scenes.

There’s also the sense of time, or chronoception. How does your character perceive the passage of time? We know that in situations of extreme danger time seems to slow down, while during pleasurable activities it seems to speed up. Page design and panel rhythm can reflect these temporal distortions, as Chris Ware so brilliantly demonstrates in “Building Stories”.

Even the sense of familiarity (or its absence, as in “déjà vu” or “jamais vu”) can be a powerful narrative tool. Think about how Emil Ferris in “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters” plays with the sensation of simultaneous familiarity and unease to create tension.

Looking for strategies to incorporate these less explored senses into your graphic narratives? Explore our resources here and discover how to enrich your readers’ sensory experience beyond the conventional.

Sensory translation: From the real world to the language of comics

Once you have experienced, imagined, and collected all these sensory impressions, the crucial moment arrives: translating them into the specific language of comics. This translation is not literal but transformative, using the unique tools this medium offers.

Comics have a coded visual vocabulary that has evolved over decades. Motion lines, onomatopoeia, visual metaphors like light bulbs for ideas or hearts for love… All are visual shortcuts to communicate complex sensory and emotional experiences.

To effectively communicate sensory experiences, consider these specific strategies:

  • For tactile sensations: Pay special attention to textures in your drawing. The stroke you use to represent different surfaces can communicate whether something is soft, rough, wet, or dry. A close-up of a hand touching a surface can be more effective than a verbal description.
  • For sounds: Beyond onomatopoeia, think about how a sound affects the environment and characters. A deafening sound can be represented by showing vibrating objects, characters covering their ears, or even distorting the edges of the panel.
  • For smells: Although intangible, smells can be represented through wavy lines, specific facial expressions (like wrinkled or dilated noses), or physical reactions (like someone involuntarily leaning toward a pleasant source or moving away from an unpleasant one).
  • For tastes: Facial expressions are key, but also visual metaphors. An explosive flavor could literally show fireworks coming out of a character’s mouth, while a bitter one could be represented with dark colors or angular lines.
  • For thermal sensations: Color is your main ally, but also visible physical effects such as sweat, breath vapor in the cold, or changes in body posture (shrinking from cold, extending from heat).

Remember that these translations don’t need to be literal or scientifically accurate. The important thing is that they evoke the right sensation in the reader. As in poetry, sometimes an unexpected visual metaphor can communicate a sensation more effectively than a literal representation.

Artists like Juanjo Guarnido (“Blacksad”) are masters of this translation, using animal anthropomorphism not only as a visual style but as a way to communicate specific sensory traits. A fox character doesn’t just look like a fox; it moves with the stealthy caution and sensory alertness we associate with these animals.

Similarly, artists like Tillie Walden use negative space and scale to communicate sensations of loneliness, smallness, or awe that go beyond the purely visual, activating emotional and bodily responses in the reader.

The reader as an active sensory participant

One of the magics of comics is that, unlike film or television, it requires the active participation of the reader to complete the experience. The space between panels, what Scott McCloud called “closure,” is where the reader actively participates in the construction of the narrative.

You can take advantage of this feature to sensorially involve your readers. Instead of explicitly showing every sensory detail, offer strategic clues that allow the reader to complete the experience with their own imagination. This creates a more personal and powerful experience.

For example, instead of directly showing an unpleasant smell, you can show the first panel with a character opening a door, the second with their expression of disgust, and let the reader mentally “smell” what’s on the other side. This approach is not only economical in terms of narrative space, but is more powerful because it actively involves the reader.

The great narrators of comics understand that the medium works best when it suggests rather than explains, when it implies rather than directly shows. Craig Thompson in “Habibi” doesn’t need to textually describe how water feels in an oasis after days in the desert; the composition of the page, the expressions of the characters, and the contrast with the previous pages make the reader almost feel that freshness on their own skin.

This principle of sensory implication extends to all aspects of comics, from page design to the choice of specific moments to show. By selecting which moments to represent and which to leave in the space between panels, you are choreographing a dance between the explicit and the implicit, the shown and the suggested.

Delve into the art of actively involving your readers through this link and discover specific techniques to transform your readers from passive observers to active participants in the sensory experience of your comics.

Practical exercises to develop your narrative sensitivity

Theorizing about the importance of the senses in comics is useful, but nothing substitutes practice. Here are some concrete exercises to develop your ability to incorporate sensory experiences into your comics:

  1. The sensory diary: Dedicate a week to keeping a diary where each day you focus on a different sense. During “hearing day,” for example, note and draw all the significant sounds you hear. Try to represent them visually in innovative ways, not just with traditional onomatopoeia.
  2. Sensory translation: Choose a piece of music that moves you and translate it into a page of comics without using words. How do you visually represent changes in rhythm, tone, and emotion?
  3. The sensory object: Take an everyday object (a fruit, a tool, a toy) and create a page where you represent what it would be like to experience it with each of the senses, including less obvious ones like balance or proprioception.
  4. Sensory memory: Remember a significant place from your childhood and draw a sequence specifically focused on non-visual sensations: the characteristic sounds, the specific smells, the distinctive textures.
  5. The sensory character: Create a character who has a unique relationship with one of their senses. It could be someone with synesthesia, a chef with an extraordinarily refined palate, or someone who has lost a sense and developed others. Explore how to visually represent their unique sensory experience.
  6. The place through the senses: Choose a place (a market, a beach, a forest) and represent it five times, each time focusing on a different sense. Observe how your visual and narrative approach changes according to the sense you prioritize.

These exercises will not only improve your ability to incorporate sensory experiences into your comics, but will also expand your visual and narrative repertoire. Over time, the integration of sensory elements will become a natural and fluid part of your creative process.

Remember that the goal is not to create perfectly realistic representations of sensory experiences, but to develop a personal visual language that allows you to communicate them effectively in the medium of comics. Coherence and expressiveness are more important than literal realism.

Access more practical exercises and visual resources here that will help you systematically develop your ability to create multisensory comics that captivate your readers.

Conclusion: Comics as a complete sensory experience

Throughout this article, we have explored how to transcend the apparent limits of comics to create experiences that will resonate on all sensory levels with your readers. As we have seen, the true magic is not in literally reproducing what you would perceive in reality, but in evoking those sensations through the unique language of the medium.

Keep these reflections in mind the next time you prepare to imagine a story. Remember that before being an artist, you are an observer and a witness of the world. Before communicating a story, you must fully experience it in your imagination, with all its smells, tastes, textures, and sounds.

Great comics, those that stay with us long after closing their pages, are not simply sequences of well-drawn images; they are portals to complete experiences that involve all our senses. They are invitations to travel, not only with sight, but with our complete being.

A little imagination can take you very far! And with the tools we’ve discussed, that imagination can transform into comics that are not only seen, but felt, tasted, smelled, and heard. Comics that don’t just tell stories, but create living worlds where your readers will want to stay.

The next time you sit at your work table, remember: you’re not simply drawing. You’re building a complete sensory experience, panel by panel, page by page. And in that process, you’re inviting your readers not only to see your world, but to fully live it.

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Imagine your stories with the five senses, before turning them into comics

The sensory power to create convincing comic worlds

Have you ever felt that your comics lack something, but you can’t identify what it is? Have you noticed how some comic pages transport you completely to another world, while others barely manage to keep you interested? The difference could be in something as fundamental as the evocation of the senses.

Have you ever created a travel sketchbook? In it, you note your experiences and impressions, as well as the way you interpret the images around you. That is, it combines image, text, design, and fantasy. What you’re trying to do is somehow capture the experiences you’re having, taking something from the trip with you. So that when you’re back, time passes and you open the notebook again, you’re somehow transported back to that place and moment.

Pay attention to this last concept, that of the moment. You might be able to return to the place, perhaps even in reality. In fact, let’s do the following: imagine that you do, you actually return to the place you visited. Also imagine that you brought your notebook, the travel sketchbook you made last time. Being there, you open it.

Suddenly you find yourself transported anyway, you’re taken back to your previous trip; despite being there in person, live, the sketchbook contains your perspective of the place the last time you visited it, and that perspective has now changed. It doesn’t just hold the images, or the data, but also what it was like for you to feel a certain specific way there, at that moment and in that place.

Do you understand what happened in this little mental experiment, do you understand the power of narrative, worldbuilding, and chronicling? Well, I hope you do, because these are essential tools for the comics you’ll create from now on, even (and I would say, especially) those that are fictional.

It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a medieval empire on Mars at the end of the 1960s: your comic will take us on a journey there, and if you play your cards right, you can make us experience being there with the same intensity as if we were opening one of your travel sketchbooks. Keep reading to learn about the importance of creating comics based on your five senses. And, in fact, you know what? Some other senses too. Because not everything is limited to sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell.

Total immersion: Turn your mind into a living stage

One of the biggest mistakes a comic artist can make is not imagining their comic in terms of a comic. You knew that, right? More than once we imagine our stories as if they were a movie, and then we struggle to make what we wanted to narrate fit into this static, soundless medium (but for that very reason so magical, let’s say it; it’s not a defect, it’s a feature).

Okay, that’s true, but let me bring you, today, an equally important maxim: another of the biggest mistakes a comic artist can make is to only imagine their story on the pages of a comic. You must start by seeing it in the reality of your mind!

Before putting any image on paper, before breaking down the events into panels and dialogues, make sure you have very clear notions about what happened, and not only that, but about what it was like to be there. Take the trouble to imagine that you’re talking about a real, factual event, which you have only afterward turned into a comic.

Yours is a fictionalization, a memory, a travel diary, and it’s your job to try to ensure that when reading the story, the reader is transported there. Don’t skimp on production costs in the theater of your mind: the smells, the tastes, every sound, how each texture felt on each character’s skin, everything can serve as material for the garden of wonders that is your imagination.

And not only that: also what the temperature was like, what the humidity was like, how each character perceived the passage of time. And, why not, what did each one’s sense of balance tell them? What was the inclination of the terrain like, how heavy (or how light) did their clothes, their objects, their bodies, their bones feel to each of them?

If at the time of creating the comic you must go through a small moment of grief, if you can’t help but lament some aspects of this mental reality that you couldn’t convey with the resources given to you by the language of comics, it means you’re doing something right. Let your comics be, all of them, from the first to the last, pale reflections of those you dreamed in your mind! Shadows, ghosts, that will still shine, believe me, standing out among those made by others who only think in terms of comics.

The smell of ink: How senses build complete worlds

Think for a moment about your favorite comics. What do they have in common? It’s probably the ability to create a world so vivid that you can almost feel it. This doesn’t happen by accident. The great masters of comics instinctively understand that a convincing story appeals to all the senses.

Will Eisner, one of the fathers of modern comics, used weather and architecture as characters in themselves. When you read “A Contract with God,” you don’t just see the Bronx of the 1930s, but you can feel the oppressive humidity of summer, smell the streets after the rain, and hear the bustle of street vendors. Eisner understood that each panel should be a complete sensory window.

Similarly, when Craig Thompson draws snow in “Blankets,” he makes you feel the cold chilling your bones, hear the crunch under your feet, and experience the almost supernatural stillness of a snowy landscape. Thompson doesn’t just draw snow; he makes you feel it.

And what about aromas? Think about how Juanjo Guarnido in “Blacksad” makes you almost smell the cheap perfume in a jazz bar, or the stale tobacco in a detective’s office. He does it through visual textures, carefully selected color palettes, and environmental details that convey complete sensory information.

Creating a sensory experience doesn’t necessarily mean overloading with details. Sometimes, it’s more effective to suggest than to explicitly show. A character wrinkling their nose at an unpleasant smell can be more powerful than an elaborate textual description. A close-up of trembling hands holding a hot cup can convey environmental cold better than drawing a frozen thermometer in detail.

Mastering this aspect of sequential art will allow you to create worlds that your readers will not only see, but feel on all levels. Discover practical tools here to develop your sensory creativity and take your comics to a completely new level of immersion.

Fieldwork: Exploring with all senses

You must also, of course, do explorations, research, scouting. It’s best if you do it firsthand: that you yourself go to a place, any place, and note what it feels like to be there. You can make lists: all the sounds you heard over 15 minutes, then all the words (they’re not always the same), then aromas, and so on.

You can then ask yourself, lists in hand, how you would tell some of these impressions in a comic. Drawings, lines that suggest what they are? Words on the page? Supporting texts, narrations that extend beyond the typical “meanwhile”? What about using a character’s narrative voice, or even better, their thought bubbles?

“When I arrived at the train station, I was surprised by how the wood at the ticket office had accumulated mold” can be a great introduction to a scene, and also allow you to use the drawing to show other aspects of the station. (That is, you don’t need to show the ticket office if you’re already describing it in the text. Or, at least, you don’t need to show the mold).

You can also take advantage of a great benefit, which is including an emotion in addition to a description, in an observation that delivers two for the price of one. (In the case of my example, the emotion was surprise. Would you ever think that the character spends many of his afternoons at that station? Of course not, but how do you know if I didn’t tell you? You see, how easy it is, it’s just a matter of showing him surprised by a fact that would be well known to anyone who spent all their days there. Could we do the same if the narrator was the person selling tickets at the booth?)

It doesn’t matter if your story takes place in a bar and you only have access to a nearby park, the important thing is to get out of your house! (Although, thinking about it a bit, you can also do this exercise at home…)

Sensory memory: Your personal library of experiences

There is an invaluable resource that every artist possesses and that often remains unexploited to its full potential: sensory memory. This is the personal library of experiences you have accumulated throughout your life, each labeled with rich and detailed sensory information.

When you need to draw a character walking on the hot sand of a beach, turn to your own experience. Do you remember how they took short, quick steps? How they lifted their feet exaggeratedly? The facial expression of discomfort mixed with determination? These are not things you can effectively research on Google.

Similarly, when you want to convey the feeling of a rainy day, turn to your memories. How does light change during a storm? How does people’s behavior change? What sounds predominate and which ones disappear? How does humidity affect different textures?

There is a particularly useful exercise to develop this library: sensory reconstruction. Choose a vivid memory and spend time mentally reconstructing it, focusing specifically on the sensory aspects. For example, if you remember a childhood trip to the beach:

  • Sight: What exact color was the sea that day? How did light play on the waves?
  • Hearing: How did the waves sound as they broke? Were there seagulls? How did your voice sound under the sun?
  • Touch: How did the sand feel between your fingers? The contrast between skin warmed by the sun and cold water?
  • Smell: What did it smell like? Salt? Sunscreen? Seaweed?
  • Taste: Do you remember the salty taste on your lips? Did you eat something special that day?

If you regularly practice this type of reconstruction, you’ll be sharpening a crucial tool for your work as a comic artist. Your ability to evoke and transmit sensory experiences will significantly improve, and your stories will gain depth and credibility.

Want to explore practical methods to enrich your characters with sensory experiences? Visit this link for inspiration and discover exercises that will expand your creative repertoire.

The balance between showing and suggesting: Sensory economy

In the world of comics, where space is limited and each panel must count, learning to balance what you show and what you suggest is fundamental. This “sensory economy” is what separates efficient visual narrators from redundant ones.

Consider, for example, how Frank Miller in “Sin City” uses extreme black and white contrasts not only as a visual style, but as a way to communicate tactile and thermal sensations. When we see Marv walking in the snow, the brutal contrast between the blackness of his figure and the absolute white of the environment immediately conveys the cutting cold, without needing to show his condensed breath or explain it through text.

At the other end of the spectrum, Moebius (Jean Giraud) uses meticulous and detailed lines to create worlds where you can almost feel every texture, from the roughness of a stone wall to the softness of an exotic fabric. His attention to detail is not gratuitous, but a deliberate way of transmitting sensory information.

Both approaches are valid, but the crucial thing is to understand that you don’t need to communicate everything. Sometimes, a single drop of sweat on a character’s forehead can convey more about the stifling heat of a room than an elaborate description or multiple visual indicators.

This economy also extends to how you distribute sensory information throughout your narrative. Perhaps in one scene you focus on sounds, in another on smells, and in a third on textures. You don’t have to activate all the senses on every page or scene; in fact, doing so could overwhelm the reader.

Learn to prioritize which sense is most relevant for each moment of your story. Is it a scene where the taste of a meal changes the protagonist’s life? Then focus your attention on conveying that gustatory experience. Is it a moment of tension where sudden silence forebodes danger? Then hearing (or its absence) should take center stage.

This selective distribution not only makes your narration more effective, but also creates rhythm and variety in the reading experience. Click here to discover resources that will help you master this sensory balance and apply it effectively in your next stories.

Narrative synesthesia: When one sense evokes another

Synesthesia, that phenomenon where one sense involuntarily evokes another (like “seeing” colors when hearing music), can be a powerful narrative tool in your comics. Although not everyone experiences synesthesia neurologically, we can all take advantage of its principles to create richer sensory connections in our stories.

Consider how David Mack in “Kabuki” uses visual textures, spilled watercolors, and collage to convey not only images, but tactile sensations and emotional states. When you see a page by Mack, you don’t just observe it; you can almost feel its texture, smell the materials, hear the whisper of the brushstrokes. It’s a multisensory experience triggered by purely visual stimuli.

To implement this concept in your work, think about multisensory associations. For example:

  • Warm colors (reds, oranges) not only represent visual heat, but can evoke tactile sensations of warmth, spicy smells, or hot flavors.
  • Wavy or vibrant lines can suggest movement, but also undulating or liquid sounds.
  • Marked contrasts not only affect visually, but can convey physical tension, contrasting flavors, or abrupt temperature changes.

A particularly effective technique is the “cross-sensory metaphor,” where you express one sense through another. For example, you could show a deafening sound through a panel where all visual elements are distorted or fragmented. Or you could represent a nauseating smell through wavy green lines emanating from the object, even affecting the shape of the panels or texts.

This technique works because our brain already establishes these connections naturally. When we see something that looks rough, our brain simulates that tactile sensation even though we’re only receiving visual information. Your job as a comic artist is to take advantage of these pre-existing connections and use them deliberately.

The great Japanese manga masters have perfected this art, especially in genres like gastronomic. Think about how “The Gourmet” or “Oishinbo” make you almost taste the dishes represented only with black ink on paper. They achieve this not only through precise visual details, but by creating an entire sensory choreography that activates multiple senses simultaneously.

The invisible senses: Beyond the five traditional senses

When we talk about sensory experience, we tend to limit ourselves to the five traditional senses. However, human beings possess many more sensory systems that can greatly enrich your comics.

Consider, for example, proprioception: that sense that allows you to know where each part of your body is without needing to look at it. It’s what allows you to type without looking at your fingers or bring food to your mouth without spilling it. In your comics, you can take advantage of this sense to convey how a character perceives their own body in space. An expert warrior moving in perfect harmony versus a clumsy teenager who is still adapting to his accelerated growth will have radically different proprioceptive experiences.

Equally important is the sense of balance or vestibular system. Think about how to convey the sensation of vertigo when looking from a tall building, the disorientation after a blow, or the strange floating in zero gravity. Artists like Dave McKean have experimented with distortion of perspective and unbalanced compositions to convey these altered states of balance.

Another fascinating sense is interoception: the perception of internal body sensations. This includes heartbeat, breathing, hunger, thirst, body temperature. When a character is terrified, they don’t just show specific facial expressions; they also experience an increased heart rate, accelerated breathing, muscle tension. Conveying these internal sensations can add a layer of authenticity to your emotional scenes.

There’s also the sense of time, or chronoception. How does your character perceive the passage of time? We know that in situations of extreme danger time seems to slow down, while during pleasurable activities it seems to speed up. Page design and panel rhythm can reflect these temporal distortions, as Chris Ware so brilliantly demonstrates in “Building Stories”.

Even the sense of familiarity (or its absence, as in “déjà vu” or “jamais vu”) can be a powerful narrative tool. Think about how Emil Ferris in “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters” plays with the sensation of simultaneous familiarity and unease to create tension.

Looking for strategies to incorporate these less explored senses into your graphic narratives? Explore our resources here and discover how to enrich your readers’ sensory experience beyond the conventional.

Sensory translation: From the real world to the language of comics

Once you have experienced, imagined, and collected all these sensory impressions, the crucial moment arrives: translating them into the specific language of comics. This translation is not literal but transformative, using the unique tools this medium offers.

Comics have a coded visual vocabulary that has evolved over decades. Motion lines, onomatopoeia, visual metaphors like light bulbs for ideas or hearts for love… All are visual shortcuts to communicate complex sensory and emotional experiences.

To effectively communicate sensory experiences, consider these specific strategies:

  • For tactile sensations: Pay special attention to textures in your drawing. The stroke you use to represent different surfaces can communicate whether something is soft, rough, wet, or dry. A close-up of a hand touching a surface can be more effective than a verbal description.
  • For sounds: Beyond onomatopoeia, think about how a sound affects the environment and characters. A deafening sound can be represented by showing vibrating objects, characters covering their ears, or even distorting the edges of the panel.
  • For smells: Although intangible, smells can be represented through wavy lines, specific facial expressions (like wrinkled or dilated noses), or physical reactions (like someone involuntarily leaning toward a pleasant source or moving away from an unpleasant one).
  • For tastes: Facial expressions are key, but also visual metaphors. An explosive flavor could literally show fireworks coming out of a character’s mouth, while a bitter one could be represented with dark colors or angular lines.
  • For thermal sensations: Color is your main ally, but also visible physical effects such as sweat, breath vapor in the cold, or changes in body posture (shrinking from cold, extending from heat).

Remember that these translations don’t need to be literal or scientifically accurate. The important thing is that they evoke the right sensation in the reader. As in poetry, sometimes an unexpected visual metaphor can communicate a sensation more effectively than a literal representation.

Artists like Juanjo Guarnido (“Blacksad”) are masters of this translation, using animal anthropomorphism not only as a visual style but as a way to communicate specific sensory traits. A fox character doesn’t just look like a fox; it moves with the stealthy caution and sensory alertness we associate with these animals.

Similarly, artists like Tillie Walden use negative space and scale to communicate sensations of loneliness, smallness, or awe that go beyond the purely visual, activating emotional and bodily responses in the reader.

The reader as an active sensory participant

One of the magics of comics is that, unlike film or television, it requires the active participation of the reader to complete the experience. The space between panels, what Scott McCloud called “closure,” is where the reader actively participates in the construction of the narrative.

You can take advantage of this feature to sensorially involve your readers. Instead of explicitly showing every sensory detail, offer strategic clues that allow the reader to complete the experience with their own imagination. This creates a more personal and powerful experience.

For example, instead of directly showing an unpleasant smell, you can show the first panel with a character opening a door, the second with their expression of disgust, and let the reader mentally “smell” what’s on the other side. This approach is not only economical in terms of narrative space, but is more powerful because it actively involves the reader.

The great narrators of comics understand that the medium works best when it suggests rather than explains, when it implies rather than directly shows. Craig Thompson in “Habibi” doesn’t need to textually describe how water feels in an oasis after days in the desert; the composition of the page, the expressions of the characters, and the contrast with the previous pages make the reader almost feel that freshness on their own skin.

This principle of sensory implication extends to all aspects of comics, from page design to the choice of specific moments to show. By selecting which moments to represent and which to leave in the space between panels, you are choreographing a dance between the explicit and the implicit, the shown and the suggested.

Delve into the art of actively involving your readers through this link and discover specific techniques to transform your readers from passive observers to active participants in the sensory experience of your comics.

Practical exercises to develop your narrative sensitivity

Theorizing about the importance of the senses in comics is useful, but nothing substitutes practice. Here are some concrete exercises to develop your ability to incorporate sensory experiences into your comics:

  1. The sensory diary: Dedicate a week to keeping a diary where each day you focus on a different sense. During “hearing day,” for example, note and draw all the significant sounds you hear. Try to represent them visually in innovative ways, not just with traditional onomatopoeia.
  2. Sensory translation: Choose a piece of music that moves you and translate it into a page of comics without using words. How do you visually represent changes in rhythm, tone, and emotion?
  3. The sensory object: Take an everyday object (a fruit, a tool, a toy) and create a page where you represent what it would be like to experience it with each of the senses, including less obvious ones like balance or proprioception.
  4. Sensory memory: Remember a significant place from your childhood and draw a sequence specifically focused on non-visual sensations: the characteristic sounds, the specific smells, the distinctive textures.
  5. The sensory character: Create a character who has a unique relationship with one of their senses. It could be someone with synesthesia, a chef with an extraordinarily refined palate, or someone who has lost a sense and developed others. Explore how to visually represent their unique sensory experience.
  6. The place through the senses: Choose a place (a market, a beach, a forest) and represent it five times, each time focusing on a different sense. Observe how your visual and narrative approach changes according to the sense you prioritize.

These exercises will not only improve your ability to incorporate sensory experiences into your comics, but will also expand your visual and narrative repertoire. Over time, the integration of sensory elements will become a natural and fluid part of your creative process.

Remember that the goal is not to create perfectly realistic representations of sensory experiences, but to develop a personal visual language that allows you to communicate them effectively in the medium of comics. Coherence and expressiveness are more important than literal realism.

Access more practical exercises and visual resources here that will help you systematically develop your ability to create multisensory comics that captivate your readers.

Conclusion: Comics as a complete sensory experience

Throughout this article, we have explored how to transcend the apparent limits of comics to create experiences that will resonate on all sensory levels with your readers. As we have seen, the true magic is not in literally reproducing what you would perceive in reality, but in evoking those sensations through the unique language of the medium.

Keep these reflections in mind the next time you prepare to imagine a story. Remember that before being an artist, you are an observer and a witness of the world. Before communicating a story, you must fully experience it in your imagination, with all its smells, tastes, textures, and sounds.

Great comics, those that stay with us long after closing their pages, are not simply sequences of well-drawn images; they are portals to complete experiences that involve all our senses. They are invitations to travel, not only with sight, but with our complete being.

A little imagination can take you very far! And with the tools we’ve discussed, that imagination can transform into comics that are not only seen, but felt, tasted, smelled, and heard. Comics that don’t just tell stories, but create living worlds where your readers will want to stay.

The next time you sit at your work table, remember: you’re not simply drawing. You’re building a complete sensory experience, panel by panel, page by page. And in that process, you’re inviting your readers not only to see your world, but to fully live it.

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