A slight updating of things…

• I’m in the thick of it right now. Right in the middle, where pages aren’t done, and everything needs my attention - one of the flaws of drawing in a super-realistic manner. Oh wait, you mean I can’t skip drawing fingernails on people? Oh but I have to make things in actual proportion to one another? Guys like Liefeld, despite the usual message board backlash which really would be easy to tune out I think, he’s got it easy work-wise though. He’s been sucking at what he does for so long, and with such a determined style, that it has to be super-fast for him to just whip out a “Liefeld page” and call it done. Oh well not drawing in eyeballs is an artistic choice! Gotcha. It’s a weird place right now for me with these pages though, and I’m barely able to keep it in check. I gave up soda last year, and I don’t drink coffee, so my workday is just a lot of podcasts, Tom Scharpling, sometimes music, and me fidgeting. I take a break when I can and go play with my cat, since the poor guy is so neglected during the days usually. I’ll check my mail or read a blog really quick a thousand times a day, between photoshop saves (that can take upwards of a minute at a time sometimes), but usually it’s just me, myself and I. I read last week Hope Larsen say something about losing yourself in this sort of work, especially when it comes to mundane pages - you’re just there trying to make a conversation look interesting, and not just for the reader but for yourself too - but still trying to keep the big picture of the whole project despite being stuck on one page of it at a time. The book I am working on, have been forever, Descent, it’s a “talking heads” book. Very little action, just a lot of chatter. A different artist than me probably woulda whipped it out in 5-6 months, but me being so OCD has taken almost 4 years on it (holy shit!), as I’ve found the only way to even keep the work interesting for me was to make the pages really interesting to look at, or at least tried to. And the problem with that has been, I’ve got such a high personal standard of what looks good to me, that there is I guess no way for me to fake it if I’m putting my name on it in the end. So blah.

I guess what all this means is, I’m drowning in pages and days and hours, and I wish there was a way I could turn my brain on auto-pilot and just ink this crap out, and then you know, wake up in a month and it’s done. I could probably bang the whole of what’s left in the book out in 2 weeks that way, if I could just sit here and ink nonstop for that whole time. Not really possible though, so it’s still just a slow work in progress. And yes, there’s been lots of progress lately (which is good), but nothing is finished or worth showing off (which is depressing). GAH.

Rambling nonsense, yeah?

It’s early, almost noon, and I’m gearing up for another 7-8 hours of inking, having trouble psyching myself up for it today. Gotta splash some cold water on my face though, as El Goodo says, and just get to it.

GOTTA DO IT.