...And putting it online anyway.

After calculating a realistic drawing schedule, I realised I could just as well post this story online while I'm working on it. If I wanted to complete it before posting anything, I wouldn't update my site in 14 months. And that sounded a bit harsh to me.

So, here's what I'll be aiming for: three pages a week. I'll be posting them in monthly installments of twelve, to cut myself some slack. The first six pages are up now, for starters. Enjoy!

Draw it again. And again. And again.

There's hardly been any time to draw pages these past few weeks! I'll be working fulltime until the end of June  and I'm moving house as well. And then there's a couple of family matters... Oh, well. Just a few more weeks until I get my 'drawing Tuesday' all back for myself.

In the meantime, here's an idea of how I've been tweaking the first couple of pages. It's another reason my progress has slowed down: these first pages have become a kind of test lab where I can work out some style / drawing issues.

version 1:

version 2:

version 3:

Well, I hope this panel has improved...

Page!

The past few weeks have been incredibly busy (at the office, mostly), but I have been able to squeeze out the first couple of pages! Inked, lettered, scanned and all! I'm so glad this project is finally up and running. 

Also, I'm slowly building up my (work)flow. Two-hour sessions seem to work best, with some crocheting afterwards to unwind my brain. That way, I'll have a comic AND a nice blanket in a couple months time!

Again, I'll chart my progress in the column on the right. And I'm considering to publish the story as it unfolds, in episodes of about 12 pages.

Pre-pencilling jitters & new tools

Hey, the page layouts are complete! They have been for over a week! Shouldn't I have some pages up by now? Yeah, I should... But I'm down with a small bout of 'pre-pencilling jitters'... I've got everything lined up to start drawing, and now I'm worried I'll mess things up as soon as I put my pencil to the paper. Or worse, that my inking will ruin any reasonably pencilled page...

But the only way to get better at drawing is to just do it, right? Lots and lots of it. Even if it means doing a page over and over again.

It's probably not the pencilling I should be worried about, it's the inking. My inking is hardly as tight as I would like it to be, and it doesn't 'read' very well. It's funny: I love inking, it's my favourite part of the process, but I've never given it any thought until now. I just race my brush around without planning line width, direction or anything. Perhaps it would be even better to just switch back to inking with (dip) pens and let the brush rest for a while...

So this past week I've been reading and watching inking tutorials. And I've bought a bunch of new pens and markers to experiment with. All I've got to do now is just start drawing. Right... 

Page layouts

The page thumbnails are coming at a steady pace - I'm marking their progress in the list on the right - and I'm really enjoying this job! These tiny sketches probably don't make any sense to anyone but me, and they look terrible, but they're really helpful. I hardly include any visual ideas for pages or panels when I'm writing a script, so this step in the process forces me to create an actual comic out of a big pile of words.

I'm well on my way to finishing these by the end of the month. Only eight more days before I can start pencilling actual pages... Yay!