I’m in the last two months of production (hopefully) and the amount of work that goes into making one of these books is really starting to make itself known to me. I’ve been chugging right along and things have been coming out well, but the strain of this book is becoming pretty real. Not meaning to complain here, it’s been a ton of fun! But when you begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but you know you still have a few miles to go until you get there… that light can seem really far away, especially when you are running full sprint. The thing I try and keep in mind is that this book will teach me how to do things better the next time. The work load is a lot, but trying to be fast about it and turn a product around in a very short period has really shown me, that this is no easy task at all.
I’m pushing ahead full speed, and I do have a nice break coming up with some vacation in a few weeks. Hopefully that will recharge the batteries and have me back at home working at a steady pace, completing this book just in time for October.
The next big thing I am trying to schedule right along side the other work is adjustments. Over time as you work on a book, your characters and designs can sort of shift in appearance. Here’s an example:
My ability to draw my characters improved a lot over the span of working on this book. I feel now like I understand them better, what makes them appealing, what doesn’t etc. At least to where I can see a lot of inconsistency early on. Now I know this is somewhat normal with a comic. We draw the same characters over and over… they will appear different at times. But there are many pages early on where I think it’s just jarring. So what I have been doing is going through each page and will making these types of changes. On many of the early pages I will be redrawing faces completely for a character here and there. I really want this book to feel pro, beginning to end and these sorts of things, just don’t sit well with me. I hope it will make it all feel unified and awesomes!
Writing on book 2 has been stop and go. I have no real urgency at the moment to have it ready to go and am trying to get over the hurdle on a few things storywise before I commit to writing it again. Very soon though as I hope to be producing the second book early 2013.
I hope everyone out there is well and your projects are coming along well. See you all next time.