Halfway through November: Comic update and jobs

I haven’t wrote here for a tiny bit, just been busy with life, but I have some time to write, so I want to just give an update now.

First of all, I finally got a job! It took a while (and many rejections too…), but it finally happened. However, I’m working in food service, which is a weird contrast from my old job doing retail work. I just started yesterday and I’ll be going in later today to start a full shift, so I’ll get an idea of how the job will be. I only work evenings, so I’m happy about that since I can avoid lunch rushes, but I still have to deal with dinner… I don’t think it’s that bad, though. I only tried the job a little yesterday, but it seemed alright, just need to be on your toes.

Secondly, I am inching closer to finishing the first three chapters of my comic, and it should happen pretty soon at this point. I’ve been talking about it on and off, but I have been (for the most part) working on it pretty consistently, just really slowly, only doing about 2-3 panels a day. There’s a few reasons for that.

Motivation

For the most part, I like to think that I have been relatively motivated to work on the project, however at times, there are moments where I don’t feel like working on the comic, and as to not push myself too hard and burn out, I have been taking these motivation dips seriously and I didn’t touch the project during those times. It wasn’t anything major, typically a couple of days, but that definitely slowed things down. Not to mention, I also had motivation dips stem from doubts about whether I should be writing this or not, if it was good, etc. However, I’ve been generally good at flipping things around when those times come, and now I’m close to the point I wanted to be at before uploading it online.

Artistic choices

I won’t say what happens in the comic, to avoid spoilers I guess, I don’t know, but to sum up, in the beginning I thought it would be neat to change the method of illustration from digital to pencil and paper scraps temporarily, as a way to convey the difference in the worlds my main character is dealing with. However, while this only lasts about two chapters, the work has proven itself to be rather tedious. For every panel, I would have to:

• Draw the characters/objects on paper
• Tear them out
• Lay them out on another paper
• Scan them
• Plot the scans digitally on the comic pages

It doesn’t sound that bad, however, this grew very annoying really quickly. As a result, I feel like the quality of this section is rather lacking, which has also contributed to my occasional lack of motivation. In retrospect, I think this was not a good approach to take, and if I ever chose to come back to it, I would scrap that idea. However, my ideology for this project is not to make a good project, but instead to make a project. Whenever it comes to these sorts of projects, like writing or drawing, I never got far in the past because of perfectionism, so this project is my way to try to stray away from the idea that my creations need to be good because the idea is that at least I would’ve made something, regardless of quality, and that’s more than I would’ve ever done before had I kept the same mentality.

This is not to say that quality in general is not a focus or priority of my comic at all, I do try to take that into account. I have especially been recently putting a lot of thought in the writing side of things. However, I’m not afraid to make mistakes with this project, and once something is done in it, there’s no going back to it for me.

Anyways, that’s enough excuses for that. I only have a few pages left of the current chapter to complete, and I’ve already finished all the paper sections and have begun transitioning back to digital, so hopefully I will finish it soon. With the new job I have, we’ll see.

Thank you for reading :)