Thursday, August 13, 2009

Ain't blogged in a minute...

I don't like to talk politics, but I'm getting sick of all this craziness surrounding health care reform. You'd think the people of America (or at least the Republicans) don't want any change at all. Everyone says reform is necessary, but the only ones putting out ideas are the ones putting in work. Everybody else claims that "Obamacare" will kill the country and encourage euthanasia, and you got people chanting "Death to Obama" over this crap... but no one is coming up with anything better or even different. So I guess we're happy with the way things are.

Oy. Anyway, what I really wanted to blog about was how smooth my Jet Dancer planning progress is. It's so funny that when forced to be away from deviantART for a while (it doesn't seem like my job is going to restore social network access on our computers any time soon, if at all), I don't seem to struggle with indecisiveness the way I used to. It used to take nary a simple thought about a moment in Nia Black's story or the background of my WCL project to make me shift gears and go back to developing one of them, but nowadays I can actively think about the ideas in terms of what I did wrong with them and why they didn't work out (yet), considering all my mistakes while developing my definitive concept, Jet Dancer.

I was giddy as a schoolgirl with the turnout in my Jet Dancer jam (here) even though it wasn't a huge amount of entries, I appreciated every one of them. It makes me feel like this character can really go places.

I have been spending the last couple of weeks developing the graphic novel in between all my other responsibilities. I have vowed not to pencil a single page until I planned all 48. Some might think that it's no big deal that I've roughed up sketchy thumbnails of pages, but the way I think about it is this: part of building a house is finalizing the blueprints and layout so you know exactly what you're building. It's not minor--that's a huge step. A solid blueprint leads to a strong structure. These thumbnails are my blueprints, and I'm nearly done. My motivation was re-invigorated and I roughed up to page 40 today. I actually planned out eight pages today, when my usual record was four, and for a few days last week, I barely did one or two. If I can keep the same pace, I can have this entire book planned out by tomorrow evening. Then I can move on to page penciling and the cover.

It feels great to be getting somewhere. I'm tempted to scan and upload the rest of the layouts, but I think I won't. I am working on other art too, but I'm not sure if I want to upload anything that might distract me.

I guess that's it for now. Stay strong, stay busy, stay moving forward.