This week I finally started sketching the pages of the prologue of Recollection City.
The reason for this specific blogpost is that I could have started sketching these pages earlier. but I fell into the trap of wanted everything to be “ready” before starting to draw the pages.
I had been focusing on tying some loose ends together with the story and the structure of it. I was doing the homework of the course I’m doing, Oatley Academy Live. I made influence sheets, did new thumbnails, etc. And that’s all good, but last week I realized I was stalling the drawing.
I made “starting to make the pages” a milestone of sorts in my mind, so it became a bigger deal to start them.
I am someone who loves coming up with ideas, reworking a story, trying out new things without pressure and then I freeze up when anything definitive has to be put on a page. I also know that when I just start and get a move on, this feeling will pass quickly and I will be way more confident, cutting, pasting, erasing and changing stuff directly over my sketches.
But I didn’t start, I wanted to be better at perspective drawing than I currently am. I wanted to have everything designed, colour scripted, completely thumbnailed and explored compositionally.
The perspective drawing was holding me back especially, I was dreading looking at backgrounds being all clunky and awkward. Reminding myself of the fact that part of the reason I`m making this comic is that I will get better at comic making helped a bit. Still, I wanted the pages to be the best looking as they could. Which is why I didn`t start them. (Ironic, right?)
Designing everything beforehand will take a long time to do. Which is fine if you’re making a very short story. It’s even essential if you’re making a one image drawing or painting, which is a different form of storytelling and asks for a different approach. But when doing so many drawings for a story, carefully designing everything before ever making one page ensures you’ll not finish your long form comic in years to come.
I need to start making pages, I worked on the story long enough, I have CTNx coming up as a deadline to have something more to show than concepts, and most importantly, this comic needs to be made so I can put it online for you all to read.
There’s a reason that, in big movie productions, scenes will always be in various stages of development. It’s just inefficient to finish one stage of the process and let the other departments just sit around for a year, doing nothing. With making long comics, this is the same. I needed to realize this again.
Story, colour and getting better at drawing itself will always be part of the process, for the whole length of making this comic.
Keeping this in the front of my mind will hopefully free me up to not see every stage of comic making as a new step and a big deal, but see it as any part of the process. I hope it keeps me focused on reaching other kind of milestones, like finishing scenes or even chapters.
Of course things need planning and design. You need to know what clothes your characters will be wearing in a scene, you need to know which colours to pick when you’re colouring and for your most important panels you might get better results if you explore the many possibilities first.
But you can come up with a lot of these things during the process of making the pages themselves. And not everything is equally important too. A few fellow artists shared that for designing and thumbnailing for longer stories, they’d focus more on their most important panels and key moments and trust that their artistic ability would make sure that the rest looked good as well.
It’s an interesting discovery process of how much you need to prepare beforehand until you just need to say: for the sake of progress I need to call this “enough” and move a scene or page to the next stage. This is what I’ll be exploring in the coming weeks and I’ll keep you updated about that.
Thanks for reading!
Is there something in your life or a creative process right now that you put a mental obstacle in front of? Watch for things like “I will start this when…” If you want you can share about it in the comments. It might help you acknowledge that you need to get over the threshold and start doing something.
