Well I have basically accepted that for the next two to three months, life is going to be very busy and me very tired. Sure I could pace myself and just nibble away here and there, but DARN IT! I am THIS CLOSE! (making a motion with my hands). I spend my nights from about 11pm on strapped to my desk, headphones on ready to make books. I have done a bit of what my friend Stephen McCranie calls “impossible math” to figure out what needs to be done to get this book done as quickly as possible. It may be impossible, but I live in impossible world!
One of my greatest frustrations with making graphic novels is how long they can take and I really wanted to push myself to make a book in year. So far that goal looks attainable. You do have to listen to your body and not over exert yourself. Though I find that at least for me, I can do pretty well with a smaller measure of sleep and generally a lot of stuff is just being lazy and CHOOSING other things over what I really say I desire from my work. It’s a bit psychological.
It also helps that I have some great company up at night. Skpye chats abound in the late hours and I’ve gotten to talk to a number of great artists late in the evening as we all plug away at our work. It’s like having a mini studio online. So thanks for keeping me focused late at night guys! 🙂
With that said, I have inked two pages since last I wrote and chapter 4 is looking solid. The penciling process is nearly done with only 16 pages left to pencil. Once all of this is said and done I am finding that I will have about two weeks worth of clean up and redraws ahead of me to make chapter 1 and 2 just fit a bit better with the art as the book progresses. I changed from doing my inks with traditional tools early on to now working all digitally for my inks and some of the technical feel that the later pages have. I am REALLY excited about that process of making the book feel like one complete thought. Right now I look through it and see progression, which is to be expected, but I want to dull out as a whole. Thanks for sticking around. There may not be a lot of preview panels from the this point on. Too many delicious spoilers!