2018 was the year I decided that putting pithy sentences about the year at the top of my archive pages was a bad idea, but apparently not the year I decided to stop doing it.
Whoops, my hand slipped and I accidentally did another Inktober instead of working on my comic. Don't worry, I am working on that again (in case you missed my last post). But more on that later. For now, I want to talk about these goofy little ink drawings.
I didn't want to do what I did last time and put a description of each piece in the gallery description. Rather than clutter that page with descriptions and still have to pare everything down to a sentence or two, I figured I'd just make a separate post over here in the blog. There are some pieces I'm skipping because I don't have anything interesting to say about them, but you can see the complete assortment in the gallery.
I did much better this year than in 2016 with sticking with the challenge, even though my work schedule means I had less time in the evenings for actually working on the drawings. I'm proud to say that I didn't miss a single day this time. I'm less proud of how some of the drawings turned out, though; I feel like I got sloppy with a lot of them. But without further ado:
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As you've probably noticed, progress on the comic has stalled out.
Let me start with where things stand: I have completely given up on my timetable. I've barely accomplished anything since my last update in the summer, and there's no way to get all the remaining work done in less than two months. I'm not going to set a new timetable, because that would just be setting myself up to repeat the same failure again. However, make no mistake: I absolutely intend to finish the project. I'm just going to have to make some major adjustments in my approach.
So let me take a moment to explain what went wrong, and then I'll go over my new plan.
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I took a break from the ongoing comic project to do another Inktober challenge, and finally have the resulting drawings put together and ready to post. You can see them in the gallery. Sorry it took so long to get these posted.
While I was poking around the gallery anyway, I updated all the deviantArt links from the old username.deviantart.com scheme to the new deviantart.com/uername scheme, and made them all https.
I also owe you a post on the comic project, as my timetable has pretty much evaporated. I'm working on a post about the Inktober drawings themselves, too, since I decided not to describe them individually in the gallery description this time. Watch this space.
I'm officially behind schedule. There are several reasons for this, some of which may justly be called excuses or chalked up to poor time management on my part: There's the burnout I wrote about in the previous update, of course, as well as the mostly unrelated drawing I worked on to get over said burnout. There's the series of non-art-related projects I worked on for other people. There's also my work schedule, which has me spending a lot more time commuting than before, leaving me with little time or energy on workday evenings. Then, of course, there's my habit of getting bogged down in too many details.
First things first: I didn't get that other drawing finished, but I'm proud of what I have so far. I'll go ahead and share the WIP here:
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Lots of people attempt to refute, or at least deflect, criticism of hypersexualized female characters by pointing to all the equally exaggeratedly buff men. Feminists often respond by pointing out that these exaggerated male bodies are power fantasies for men, whereas the implausibly voluptuous female characters are sexual fantasies for… well, also for men.
Actually, let me address that bit briefly: A big part of the problem is the asymmetry of how the hypersexualized women aren't for the (dubious) benefit of the female audience in the same way that the hypermuscular men are for the male audience.
There's merit to the idea that both forms of objectification are primarily for men, but there's also merit to the idea that these exaggerated, unattainable male bodies are hurtful to the men they ostensibly benefit. This is an important issue with a lot to unpack, from the historical prevalence of misogyny over misandry, to the double-edged nature of sexism, to the various meanings of the phrase “male gaze.” I don't want to dismiss all this as unimportant, by any means, but it's also not the part I want to focus on in this post.
Rather, my focus is the rejection of the argument on the basis that the objectified female characters are a sexual fantasy while the objectified male characters are a power fantasy.
This seems like a good argument on the face of it, and I don't fully disagree. The objectified male characters are given attributes that are directly associated with power, with the ability to act on the world and the people in it. …
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The month of April has come and gone, and with it, my self-imposed deadline for finishing all my location designs. How did these designs turn out? The answer, a resounding "meh."
First of all, I'm not posting any of that design work here due to spoilers. That's not to say that the comic is going to have a ton of plot twists or anything like that, but I still think it'll be better to read it for the first time without knowing in advance what's ahead. Pretty much everything I did on the location front either spoils something or just isn't interesting enough to show.
Don't get me wrong: For those areas where the location matters somewhat, I managed to think everything through and come up with something plausible. But I realized that most of the things I was agonizing over were going to appear in no more than one or two panels, and that at the end of the day, this is only a seven-page story. It's not like I'm designing a recurring location for a series. Sure, I do have some vague ideas about what I'd like to do if I decide to make this an ongoing series (please don't hold your breath) but if that happens, I can always update the designs then.
So in that spirit, I made the choice that, while I wouldn't give up entirely on caring about set design and props, I was done worrying about them. As far as I got, plus one or two references I can easily look up, will suffice.
Consequently, I did not spend the majority of April designing sets and props. And it's a good thing, too, because the character designs are due at the end of this month, and it turns out I had no idea what my main characters actually look like.
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Thumbnailing is usually the easiest part of a project for me. I don't have to sweat the details and can focus on just getting ideas down on paper. It’s the most creative part of the process, and I haven’t managed to “correct” all the energy out of it yet.
So I actually got these pretty close to finished a couple weeks ago. I decided to wait awhile and look back over them with fresh eyes just to make sure I hadn't missed any big problems, and I'm glad I did! Once I stitched all my "final" thumbnails together and read through them as a single comic, it dawned on me that the reader doesn't get a good look at the sorceress—the ostensible main character—until halfway through the comic.
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It's March now, and that means I'm more than halfway to my first deadline. So where do things stand?
Well, let's start with that first deadline itself: The thumbnails. The good news is that I have five pages pretty well nailed down. The layouts of some of them still need some work, but I've budgeted for that. That's what the separate layouts step is for.
The bad news is that I'm stuck on page 6. So far, every page has been a single story beat. Page one (of which I've already shown some draft thumbnails) shows the sorceress ambushing someone. Page two is a fight scene. Page three is a couple actions, but basically one story beat. Page four is another beat. Page five is a location change. Page six…?
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I think I've come up with a tentative set of deadlines for completing my comic. I'm giving myself the whole year. This may seem like a long time, but if you've seen my blog and art gallery, you know I'm not exactly Mister Rapid Content Creation. Besides, I'd rather give myself a lot of time and be able to get ahead of schedule than fall behind a shorter deadline.
Here's the breakdown:
| Task | Deadline |
|---|---|
| Thumbnails/page breakdowns | March 31 |
| Environment designs | April 30 |
| Main character designs | May 31 |
| Minor character designs | June 31 |
| Page layouts | July 31 |
| All pages pencilled | October 31 |
| All pages inked | November 31 |
| All pages flat colored | December 31 |
| Shaded colors | I'll get back to you… |
| All pages posted | January 7 |
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Last summer, I said I wanted to update this blog more with works-in-progress and the like, to give myself some motivation to finish things. Since then, of course, it's been radio silence. Turns out I'm not good at finishing things.
So this year I've set myself a goal. Call it a New Year's Resolution if you want. I have a project that I've been sporadically chipping away at for the better part of the last two years, or maybe longer. This year, if at all possible, I'm going to finish it.
The project is a short comic featuring the sorceress lioness character from the drawing I posted at the end of 2015. Not everything is nailed down yet, but here's what I do know so far:
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