I haven’t been posting much on my progress with issue #2, so I wanted to just share that I have 12 pages of finished art, and 3 pages of roughs on my drawing board. It’s slow going for me as always, I have to juggle the needs of my day job, and my own need to work on this story. That said it’s aways about how much fuel I have in the tank for working on the story. Sometimes I need to refuel with hardcore slacking, just so my mind settles into the story again. It might seem like I’m not doing anything, but what I’m really doing is un-structuring my mind so ideas can bubble up from mind. I need that to get excited about the story again.

There’s a part of me that looks at page production, as a problem of efficiency, “how can I get the most done within the limited time I have”. I use to thumbnail all the pages, and essentially do everything in sequence; thumbnails, then roughs, then inks, then color. Eventually I found this to be such a grind, that I wasn’t enjoying the process. This resulted in me producing garbage, and not wanting to work.

So I’ve since learned that I need to give myself little rewards along the way.

For example, rather than drawing panel to panel, I’ll work on the most interesting element on the page. This gives me fuel to work, because I like what I’m seeing, and want see how the  the rest of the page looks when it’s finished. Yes there’s definite pro’s to working with a rigid schedule; you get to view the entire issue all at once, very early. So any changes can be made without too much disruption. The cons of that workflow however is that it’s less satisfying work. I find I like the surprises along the way. Sometimes the characters want to do things I hadn’t planned, or say things I didn’t intend, which moved the story into an entirely different direction.

I really love those surprises, it’s truly what fuel me to continue work on these stories!

This page that I’m sharing in this post, is page #11, and it’s where we start seeing Brian taking a role in the group, kind like a team leader. We’ll see how it evolves, hopefully there will be some surprises along the way :]