Oh my! Here I am! And HERE is Page Seven!
Things slowed down a bit for a while. Life got involved, and some epic career development which I am very excited about. Nobody has offered to pay me to draw comics for a living, but if I’ve learned anything from this Spaceship experiment, it’s that drawing comics is really hard, and I don’t think that I would want to do it for a job.
With my lack of experience in making comics that take more than a few minutes to put together, I have cut out a very steep learning curve for myself. I knew this when I started out, but I had no idea of the mires I would find myself in. I thought I would create plot, and dialogue, and then mess about drawing a lovely picture. No. There is a little of that, but then there is a (painful) world of manipulating text, and colour, and boxes to make things readable, balanced and consistent. Unless you have very carefully planned everything out (which is impossible when you are inexperienced and not entirely sure what you want to achieve), then you can become trapped in a labyrinth of …
[spilled tea all over my keyboard]
… a labyrinth of trying to create a consistent style and tone, remembering to put doors and furniture in where they have been in previous pages, trying to find the ideal font…
Argh, the ideal font. I’ve been resisting resorting to the standard Jim Davis-esque cartoony block capitals, but still trying to find something both cartoony and readable. I am not prepared to go down the painful road of writing my own text. This is hard enough already. My technical process still hasn’t solidified, and remains a kind of cyclone between paper, Photoshop and Illustrator that occasionally crashes and bursts into flame. It’s continually mystifying how much time can be spent on something, with no discernible improvement. I can only hope that skills are being picked up that will one day be used to create something wonderful. Meanwhile, Page Seven, ladies and gentlemincing!
