Drawing from Experience

Greetings,

Happy May Day!  Unsurprisingly my resent optimism has already begun to wane.  Alex continues to be hard to get a hold of and slow to follow through.  I am working on submitting to some publishers though.  Our web traffic has gone done a little, but that was to be expected.  I think it has steadied out for the time being, but I’m still quite happy with the numbers.  Over 32 countries and counting!  Hopefully they all speak English.

So I slowed down my drawing of the comic a bit.  It’s still coming along at a decent pace, just not as quickly as when I started Issue 6.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  One big one was that I was focused on drawing a new character called Loan Boy.  He’s the mascot for an online credit company, and I focused on this because I was getting paid to draw it.

It’s always nice to get paid to do something you enjoy.  It was fun to do something more cartoony than Black Snow, and to experiment more with color.  The character was not my idea, rather it was based off of the desires of the company owner.  Not what I would have thought of, but it turned out well.  You can search out the Loan Boy website if you’d like to see more, or want to buy a nice car for a cheap price!

There are a few other reasons why I’ve slowed down my work on Issue 6.  Mostly it was to avoid falling into a bad habit.  This may not be true, but in my mind I’ve got the distinct impression that I start and end Issues strong, while I rush to get through the middle and don’t give it as much attention, resulting in less interesting pages.  I want to make sure that this is not the case with Issue 6, and that it is consistent throughout.  I never want to look at anything I drew and think that I did not put enough effort into it.  So slowing down a bit gives me time to plan things out more thoroughly, do more research and to try new things.

Unless you draw, you may not have ever realized how much effort goes into it.  You have to decide exactly what you are going to draw and the best way to do it.  For instance, the ambulance I recently drew was based on many things, including images I could find online and my previous experience being around ambulances.  Look up ambulance on a Google image search and see how many different varieties you can find.  I’ll wait.

A lot, right?  Probably many you’ve never seen before because it is such a regional thing.  So not only do you have to pick the one that is the style you want, then you have to figure out how you want it to look in your context and how you’ll frame it.  Oh, and you have to make sure everyone else is going to recognize it immediately as an ambulance, no matter where they’re from.  I doubt anyone’s noticed, but many of the objects in Black Snow are based on my real world possessions and experiences.  The settings are based on very specific real world places, one scene was taken directly from one of my favorite movie scenes, and one panel came right out of another comic book that I really loved the style of.  So does any of this matter if no one has noticed?  Yes, and I’ll tell you why.  I like to think that all these little details add up to creating the comic’s overall image and identity.  They make it unique.  No one else could have done this in exactly the same way because I’ve put part of myself into it.

So last time I introduced myself by telling you extensively about my past history with technology.  I planned on telling you about my experience with drawing today, and in fact I wrote out most of it before accidentally erasing it!  Check back tomorrow for a new post where I’ll go into the subject in some detail.

Oh, I’m seeing the new Wolverine movie tonight, so I’ll give you my thoughts on that tomorrow as well.