Unknowns Production Diary no 3 – Pitching and Process 2.0

Hey everyone.  Quick post here about the progress on The Unknowns.  Things have been just busy busy busy go mode lately, and much of my time has been spent with my nose to the grind stone.  I managed to pencil, ink and letter 20 pages of the comic in the month of August, which is awesome, but is actually 6 pages behind my goal of 26 to make sure  I finish by January.  It’s OK though because I ended up starting the pitching process for THE UNKNOWNS a bit earlier than I planned do.  Not to give away too much yet, because, honestly it doesn’t mean anything for the book yet, I felt I had someone in particular I want to  share the book with now rather than later. So I began talking with this person and got from them the OK to put together a pitch now and submit it.  I finished that up over the weekend, but it kinda threw off the groove I had production wise.   It’s OK though!  I’m really happy with the pitch.  One of the bigger things asked of me to provide a few color samples and I figured I would share a couple of those pages here real quick:

I am really proud of how the color work is coming out, though I know my plans at this moment are not to continuing the coloring process unless a publishing deal is on the table, asking for it.  It was challenging because I had to color these pages in a way that I hadn’t before, in simple tones, gradients and colors.  I’m used to heavy textures and over painting a scene.  It just didn’t look good here.  But the pages came out great and look nice in the pitch.  So once I know more about that I will share it.

Otherwise, I really started to feel some fatigue in my process of working on the book.  I wasn’t as excited to work on it and the pages were starting to look kind of sparse.  I decided that it was time to look back over the process I had instilled and see if it was working.  The culprit I found was trying to both pencil and thumbnail in the same phase.  I know guys like Doug TenNapel and all can do this with relative ease, but, while it was efficient, it was very draining for ME mentally.  So I took a step back and decided I would thumbnail this week’s set of pages and then attack it.  SO MUCH BETTER!  The penciled pages are flowing quickly, the thumbnails look good.  I also think that from here until the end, the plan will be to pencil through the book and just ink pages a bit here and there as I go.  That way all of the heavy mental work is done and it’s not just go mode!  Really enjoying this process so far.  Much better suited for me.  Just goes to show you, sometimes changing up a process is just as effective in motivating you over taking a break.

I mean, who has time for a break?! 0_0