First NanoMango update
I’m struggling a bit. We’re four days in, and while I have written quite a bit of stuff in a frenzied series of sessions, including typing up dialog on my phone while on the train, I have not progressed to where there is a real plot in motion - it’s all scene setting and character introduction. It’s good, I can tell it has potential, but it isn’t ready to be drawn. And with the character art above, I have doubts.
The girl is Aideen O’Neill, a character borrowed from @cyberkitten01. I have drawn two character drawings of her so far, but they look very different from one another. I think this cartoonier, rounder version has more potential but it needs to be adjusted to look like her more. I was also disappointed in how much time this particular image took; a traditionally-drawn version was so bad all it was good for was to use it as a base for a digital redraw, which did at least fix most of the faults.
By contrast, I enjoyed how the singer’s image came together in traditional format. I found myself thinking “Hmm, I can draw a bit”. Then I ended up changing a lot of it in digital anyway, because it was too over the top. Too unkind to the singer who I imagined as an older gay man with a long-term heroin habit. Yes, traces of that habit should be visible, but maybe not as much. So I removed quite a few folds and sharp angles in his face, but I still think I may need to be more subtle about it. His age, sexuality and drug use may be the subject of gags, but they should not be jokes that he is the butt of. It’s a fine line to walk.
Originally I was going to feature another borrowed character, Jung-La from @thecosmicbeholder, but the characterization just didn’t work. I need to pair Aideen with an ingenue-type character, someone who is more down-to-earth and average but also a bit more sheltered and naive. Jung-La is none of these things, so Aideen gets an OC as a friend. But if that is the case, is it still meaningfully set in the Beholderverse, as I originally planned?
Another thing that bothers me is that NaNoMango seems to be dead. I see nothing being posted through the @mangogroove account, no new stuff on Instagram, nothing from this year on DeviantArt and no response to my forum queries about it on ComicFury. There is one artist on mastodon.art who is drawing pages but that seems to be it. Is the challenge dead? I found during Inktober that seeing others at work motivated me to stick to the discipline and I’m already finding that motivation being sapped.
