12 April ‘24 - [arch] Making a Comic in a Week, Disability and Burnout (all unrelated, of course!)
Hey Shri and folks!! LOVED seeing part three of the Lionheart Brothers cover. Stunning!! And awesome to see your process. Also cool to see what you’ve been looking at lately - I’ve just finished a rewatch of Firefly and the characters are still living in my brain a bit.
Life is a bit relentless, huh. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy working on disability stuff - meal prepping, sorting silly government forms, all that sort of thing. Exhausting and super easy to burn out on - but also sets me up for the future in my personal life and for illustration! I want to discuss the balance of pushing and burnout this week with an excellent example - I tried foreshadowing to make a comic in a week.
When I was in uni, it was easy to create cool stuff regularly - you’re constantly receiving prompts, doing activities, getting feedback etc. I still have access to these things, especially through my shared studio community, but it’s not as easy as it used to be. I miss creating finished books, in particular, so frequently. So! I challenged myself to make a comic in time for Something’s Fishy Zine Fair in Plymouth tomorrow, which was just over a week from when I started.
I had come up with the concept for the comic while travelling, written the script and done a couple of sketches. I often come up with concepts while travelling - I just don’t often follow through :P Here’s a couple of sketches I did on the journey.
I’ve been chatting to lots of people about what they enjoy about art - I’ve noticed that I tend to crave the end of the project and having the physical thing with high expectations of myself, which doesn’t lead to a very enjoyable process. Many people I’ve spoken to enjoy the ‘zone’, the focus of the project where you’re just figuring stuff out and not thinking about anything else. Bearing this in mind, I wanted to make the process as fun as possible - this comic is for fun and not for the purpose of having the thing at the end.
I started with a few development sketches of the characters and the vibe. I used ink and my funky kakimori dip pen, plus some brushes. These mediums are hard to control, which makes them good for development for me - they don’t have to be good, this time is for gestural drawings and ideas generation. Some continued doodles in my sketchbook from some downtime :) Fish wouldn't leave my brain.
After a bit of character development, I began by adapting my script into pages - I read the script and try to feel the vibes on how I want to pace the comic, considering:
How much dialogue and plot do I want to put on one page?
Do I want it to be more text or image-heavy?
Do I want it to feel fast and snappy, or slow and dreamy?
Which parts of dialogue feel like a page-turner?
Are there any twists that should be separated from the rest of the scene by a page-turn?
Are there any moments that should sit next to each other on spreads?
You can see me changing some dialogue around, writing as I draw a bit. Also playing around with some weird looking fish?? With noses???
I got a bit stuck at this stage. I was scared my script wasn’t good enough. And worried about if I could even draw fish. After a couple of chats with art friends, and some rambling in my slides, I reminded myself that the lesson this time is fun!! Have fun goddamn it!! No point doing it if you’re not having fun. (it’s not like we make any money from riso printed zines anyway)
Screenshots from my slides - these things are wonderful for gathering inspiration and venting when you run into a problem with the project.
So I decided to just go for it. Not even thumbnail, but just take a scene and draw it. I asked a studio friend to choose a number, and I drew that scene.
Because of the chatty style of the comic, and how much dialogue there was gonna be, I knew there would have to be a LOT of panels. I decided to make it A4, and use a 8x6 grid. I’ll draw the images at A3, and than scale them down to A4 when it comes to printing.
left: A3 grid on the lightbox, for tracing over || Right: A4 grid with boxes of different sizes for me to reference while choosing the layout - this way I can see the final print size
First drafts of a couple of random pages from Moon Noodles.
The first day I drew several pages that I was really happy with! It gave me a lot more confidence in my script - seeing it come to life with the characters on the page - some pages even got some laughs which was nice. I would look at the page plan, script, and spend a few minutes thinking about the pacing and how I wanted the dialogue on the page, and the go straight in with the dip pen - with the awareness that it might be wrong. This process taught me an important lesson - you have to just do it. The thing is, if you do it and it’s bad, you just do it again but different. Repeat. Staring at that script thinking it wasn’t good enough wasn’t actually going to get anything done, be fun OR make nice stuff. You have to do the thing. Then you make it better.
The other thing I learnt from this process was to give it space. There was a day where I did one page, hated it and thought the pacing was off, and spent the next day trying to translate it into two pages. It didn’t work. I came back the next day and realised the first page I’d done was fine and just needed a couple of tweaks. Do the thing. Let it be.
Here’s a little picture of my setup.
(Sorry all of Printhaus for hoarding the light box and getting ink all over it :( love u)
Finished pages to refer to, plus more A3 paper underneath for future pages
Dip pen, ink and water for keeping that little guy clean!
development sketches for relevant scenes
Page plan (you can see I have shortened it considerably since last time - now it's 20-24 pages and noted on scraps of paper so I can move them around if there's any changes of plan)
A4 sheet with boxes to show the sizes of the final print
also scissors??? i don't remember why they're here
But then monday morning came. I realised that if I wanted to get it all printed by friday, I needed to:
Plan and 12 pages on Monday, and 12 on tuesday
Get the final files for every one of the 24 pages by Thursday
Travel down to devon Friday afternoon
Not only is that basically impossible, but it would be very bad for my health, make for a rushed comic, and most importantly, not be fun. The thing is, I’ve made whole comics in a couple days before. I figured I could still do it. But that’s not actually a good thing - my skills and taste have increased, I'm aiming for bigger, more ambitious projects and yet I expect the timelines to stay the same? It doesn’t exactly work like that now, does it?
Tuesday morning, I decide to get the cover put together so I can get the preorder post-out. I get pulled into an unexpected meeting, and then spend the rest of the day inking this thing and getting the files sorted. At this point, I know for sure It’s not possible to get this done. Thankfully my two Printhaus besties were in. They helped me drop it. I love this comic, it feels fun and joyous and I’ve enjoyed working on it - lets not rush it and end up with a bad product that will bother me. Let’s take time, explore it and really enjoy the process!!!
All is not lost for Something’s Fishy Zine Fair, though! Originally, I had planned to do a print of the Moon Noodles Cover for preorders only, but why not print that for Something’s Fishy?? Anyone who buys the print will also get a discount code for the pre-order :D (also here’s the pre-order link)
So here’s a few images of the Moon Noodles cover print and the process!! I hope to see some of you at Something’s Fishy. It’s a joy to visit Plym again :D
Sketch printed out at A3, and 2 of the layers. I scanned these in and edited them on photoshop to get the files ready to print.
Coming to terms with the fact that 1) I don’t have illustration superpowers even if my expectations are that high and 2) I’m disabled (yes it’s been years and it’s still hard to face) is really hard!! I need to spend most of my time when I’m well preparing for when I’m not AND fight the urge to work until I burn out, which I always lean towards because it’s nice escapism.
The thing is that living, and not being too exhausted to move is much more important than a comic. And if I am gonna spend my functioning time making comics, they’re gonna have to be enjoyable to make. Otherwise your life slips away from you and you haven’t been really living it.
Hope that hasn’t got too deep for you. I think that stuff is important to face, especially since the creative life is so incredibly busy.
Thank you for reading this goddamn essay, I hope that it helped in some way! As usual, feel free to drop an ask if you have any questions.
