OK, time to face up to some reality: I'm not getting enough done. I joked in the Do-The-Work-Out thread that it was a time-sink away from Doing The Work, but in fact I'm getting a lot less drawing done because of the time I'm spending at the Y every day. Instead of spending most of my lunch hour drawing, I've been spending most of my lunch two-hours at the Y (and in transit), leaving only a little time for drawing. But I've finally reversed a years-long decline in my health and appearance and I don't want to give that up. Part of the problem is that I'm not disciplined enough to avoid the distractions at home (housemates, TV, books, other projects, booze, the ever-present internet). Renting a studio is out of the question, so I'm thinking of just hanging out at the office after work. The leftover work there isn't interesting enough to distract me, so as long as I turn off the internet I should be able to focus.
It is a challenge to balance the value of doing creative work with the value of everything else in your life. Uhmm, challenges make life more interesting?
"May you live an interesting life", eh? Overrated, if you ask me.
Sure, it's given me plenty of material to write about, but it's been damn annoying.
The last couple days I tried staying late at the office and working on drawing there (sitting where no one would see what I was doing), and it wasn't the silver bullet I was hoping for. I kept thinking about what I was going to have for dinner and wanting to leave for that. Plus I hate the place.
I'm now pinning my hopes on warmer weather, which will allow me to sit outside on the little porch out front in the evening, and work there with limited distractions (no TV, no books, mostly no housemates... just fleeting distractions like "there goes a cute jogger"). Not a permanent solution, but I'll settle for temporary ones for now.
Some exciting news: the cartoonist I mentioned a couple weeks ago... he's definitely going to draw a story for me. We still need to sign the paperwork, but we've agreed on price, time-frame, and responsibilities. He's Rick Worley (no relation to the late Omaha writer), who has a series online (with a collection recently in print) called A Waste of Time, featuring himself as an anthropomorphic rabbit with a thing for cute young guys and S&M. It's adorable.
The story he's drawing for me is a 10-pager that features Jason when he was still cute and young, and it's a bit S&My... which makes it a good fit for Rick's interests. Jason's at a costume party dressed as Robin, and hooks up with a guy dressed as Batman, and Rick also has a thing for Tim Drake... which makes it an even better fit. Well, except for the fact that it's the Dick Grayson costume, not the Tim Drake costume, and yes, that's a plot point in the script. When I wrote this story, I imagined it would be one that might appeal to a superhero artist (which Rick is not, he's more Crumby), but I think this will work out even better.
When I wrote this story, I imagined it would be one that might appeal to a superhero artist (which Rick is not, he's more Crumby), but I think this will work out even better.
It might very well turn out better. It's good to buck the trend of the superhero art style in order to stand out.
The cute animal stuff on his site is quirky, but the self-portrait work is even better. Reminds me a bit of R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman mixed together.
I'm going to have to pass that Crumb-mixed-with-Spiegelman comment on to Rick. If he doesn't find it flattering, I'm going to fire him. :O
Switching gears*, I sent Dale a link to my pages-in-progress for the 13-pager I'm illustrating for him... which range from a couple blanks, to a bunch of rough layouts, to a few that could pass as pencils. I was half prepared for an I'm-sorry-this-just-isn't-going-to-work response**, so I was relieved that he only had notes for individual panels here and there, and had nice things to say about a few of them. There's still the matter of productivity in getting them finished - including colors and cover - by September, but he didn't seem alarmed by the current status of the work. Still plenty of time to fall behind, eh?
*This is totally weird for me, simultaneously playing at being an artist for a published writer, and playing at being a writer for a published cartoonist. And not having time to draw for myself. Whatever happened to "I work alone"? **Have I mentioned that I don't think of myself as an artist-for-hire artist?
@Jimmie_Robinson - You may be a minor lord in Late Town, but as long as you continue to eventually deliver the goods, there will be oh so many others who outrank you.
I've got the contract with Rick in hand, so I've asked the keeper of my business account to paypal him the advance we agreed to. Woohoo!
Rick hand-letters his strip, and I was going to have him do that on this story, but he suggested that I do it digitally, for all the obvious reasons like letting me adjust the text as needed. So I've been looking for a font that at least resembles his lettering, to match his art. I'm also going to add flat color to his inks, which was my suggestion. His art doesn't really need color added, but a) I plan to do pretty much all of the other Tales in color, and b) this one has some Halloween costumes (Robin, Joker) which will be more readily identifiable in 4-color.
I've got a few other artists I want to work with (again) for this project, and a couple of them expressed interest when I mentioned it a while back, so now might be a good time to drop them a line and see if they're still game to do a story.
The story Rick is illustrating opens at a gay Halloween party in 1997. The script says simply to "have fun" with the crowd seen in the establishing panels on the first page, because I was trying not to be the kind of micromanaging writer that artists hate, and instead let him draw what he liked to draw. I just saw him asking on Facebook for suggestions of what costumes would be appropriate that year. Gotta love that kind of attention to authenticity!
I just got page 1 from Rick. Batman is a little too Adam-West-y (which is an important point, because the question of which-Robin/which-Batman is a theme of the story), and I've already talked with Rick about that, but otherwise I am very pleased. It's fairly SFW, but just in case:
In case you can't tell in this reduced image, in addition to a few gay-Halloween standards, the party-goers include a drag Poison Ivy from the Batman & Robin trainwreck (the story is set in 1997), classic Joker, and Ghostface from Scream in the first panel; and Lando and Han necking, a character from Rick's strip, and the gay Power Ranger in the last panel.
This story has gone thru a couple title changes since I started writing it, but I'm pretty sure I'm gonna go with "Seduction of the Innocent"... even though there really isn't anything innocent about anyone in it.
Switching gears back to inking "Everybody's Doin' It"... I really need to knuckle down and crank these pages out more quickly. But I'm pretty pleased with how it's turning out. The following panel, for example, which depicts male/male sexual contact and is definitely NSFW:
I like the first page, but I think by the second and third pages I'm getting a better hang of how I want to draw these characters. On the first page I'm pretty happy with all the costumes. The only thing that isn't accurate to 1997 is the bunny boy, who is based on a real British boy who's a fan of my comics, and who is about 22, so in 1997 he would have been about 7 >_<
Let's leave bunny boy as a time-traveller from the future rather than making him a 7-year-old at a gay Halloween party.
On page 3 Rick included a popular David Hockney print in the background, which was conveniently easy to color in the same style... and also provided the palette for the furniture in the room. It's starting to get a little saucy, so NSFW protection enabled:
Yeah, it didn't seem like the type of party where 7-year-olds should be :P
It's fun for me to see these come together with the colors! On the third panel of page three, for example, my inclination was to color the darker part of the wall black to show where the light from the lamp was going, but I had to keep in mind that you could do that with the color. Where the light goes over the painting, in particular, looks nice.
Comments
Sure, it's given me plenty of material to write about, but it's been damn annoying.
The last couple days I tried staying late at the office and working on drawing there (sitting where no one would see what I was doing), and it wasn't the silver bullet I was hoping for. I kept thinking about what I was going to have for dinner and wanting to leave for that. Plus I hate the place.
I'm now pinning my hopes on warmer weather, which will allow me to sit outside on the little porch out front in the evening, and work there with limited distractions (no TV, no books, mostly no housemates... just fleeting distractions like "there goes a cute jogger"). Not a permanent solution, but I'll settle for temporary ones for now.
The story he's drawing for me is a 10-pager that features Jason when he was still cute and young, and it's a bit S&My... which makes it a good fit for Rick's interests. Jason's at a costume party dressed as Robin, and hooks up with a guy dressed as Batman, and Rick also has a thing for Tim Drake... which makes it an even better fit. Well, except for the fact that it's the Dick Grayson costume, not the Tim Drake costume, and yes, that's a plot point in the script.
a superhero artist (which Rick is not, he's more Crumby), but I think
this will work out even better.
I think you're right.
Switching gears*, I sent Dale a link to my pages-in-progress for the 13-pager I'm illustrating for him... which range from a couple blanks, to a bunch of rough layouts, to a few that could pass as pencils. I was half prepared for an I'm-sorry-this-just-isn't-going-to-work response**, so I was relieved that he only had notes for individual panels here and there, and had nice things to say about a few of them. There's still the matter of productivity in getting them finished - including colors and cover - by September, but he didn't seem alarmed by the current status of the work. Still plenty of time to fall behind, eh?
*This is totally weird for me, simultaneously playing at being an artist for a published writer, and playing at being a writer for a published cartoonist. And not having time to draw for myself. Whatever happened to "I work alone"?
**Have I mentioned that I don't think of myself as an artist-for-hire artist?
Rick hand-letters his strip, and I was going to have him do that on this story, but he suggested that I do it digitally, for all the obvious reasons like letting me adjust the text as needed. So I've been looking for a font that at least resembles his lettering, to match his art. I'm also going to add flat color to his inks, which was my suggestion. His art doesn't really need color added, but a) I plan to do pretty much all of the other Tales in color, and b) this one has some Halloween costumes (Robin, Joker) which will be more readily identifiable in 4-color.
I've got a few other artists I want to work with (again) for this project, and a couple of them expressed interest when I mentioned it a while back, so now might be a good time to drop them a line and see if they're still game to do a story.
This story has gone thru a couple title changes since I started writing it, but I'm pretty sure I'm gonna go with "Seduction of the Innocent"... even though there really isn't anything innocent about anyone in it.
On page 3 Rick included a popular David Hockney print in the background, which was conveniently easy to color in the same style... and also provided the palette for the furniture in the room. It's starting to get a little saucy, so NSFW protection enabled: