Growth

Today, as crazy as it sounds, I sat down and read 'Fear Of A White Planet' for the first time. It wasn't as painful as I thought. My first impression when I flipped from the cover to the first page was 'Oh god, this drawing is so bad.' It seems to quantumly improve at some point but I don't know when.

Reading it is like learning what I don't know I now know, in terms of anatomy, perspective and fancy shit like that, but also just what I've learned about pens, pencils, erasers in that time and just how much better I have to be to be decent. Even how much I've learned about photoshop pens, brushes and erasers since doing fear of a white planet. It seems an eternity ago, yet I only finished it in March.

Suffice to say, I need to do more to get to some space (if not stylistically then technically) like these guys:



Watch at your leisure. But I need to do more, finally having gotten the spank-bank monkey off my back, I can get rolling on 'Wish'.

Story wise, 'fowp' isn't bad, I was actually surprised at how quickly I read it it must have only taken me 20 minutes. Maybe I did still remember too much, hence I had the 'writers eyes' instead of somebody who needs to use the pictures to decipher whats happening, but I could still pick up where speach bubbles were really badly placed drawing the eye away from the accompanying image. An amatuers error, but I still think that at the least I got the conversations to flow logically with the speach bubble placement.

There's also still some sequences I'm happy with, like when Chief Adama has the thermometer in his mouth, when the monster is driving the car and the beach massacre. I personally didn't think the ending worked as I had intended, I think if I had the kind of luxuries of drawing 2-3 more pages I would have slowed the pace, created a greater sense of pace.

Overall though, I admit that when it came to finishing the pencil phase of Fear Of A White Planet, I contemplated going back and redrawing the first 20 pages, but I left them in because I wanted them as a monument to how shit I was and how much I progressed as a drawer by the end of it.

So I'm just going to keep rolling and start on my next project 'Wish' I'll keep posting more details as I work on it, there's no real need to keep this one super secret, I currently estimate it will be about 125 pages long and hope to finish it by Feb. But that means probably April. It requires a big Quantum leap and I want to be really prepared with studies and technique before I start drawing it. This story I want to do far more justice than FOWP.

That said, one thing that impresses me most about fowp was that I finished it and just got it fucking out somewhere were it can be seen read and bought by people. I think most artists never even get that far and hence end up as an accountant or some shit.