blog entry
| Transitions |
| Apr 29, 2009 10:57 pm |
| Alec Longstreth recently made two more issues from his Phase 7 series available to read free online! These recent issues, number ten and eleven, document his journey into comics. I first encountered Alec’s work in high school; in fact it was largely on account of his fantastic first 24 hour comic that I was inspired to do my first 24 hour comic. Reading his autobiography also proved to be very inspirational to me! He has a great work ethic and attitude, which is encouraging to me as I try to tackle my first graphic novel.
Somewhere in the piece, called Transition, Alec briefly mentions how he listens to a radio program called This American Life while he works. Out of curiosity I checked out the podcast and found it to be profound and well done. I also found this great little animation, which is the fruits of a collaboration between This American Life and Chris Ware, another cartoonist I enjoy. After reading rave reviews by Scott Mccloud, I decided to buy a Cintiq 21UX. I ordered it today. It’s an expensive investment, but I think it’s worth it to prevent wrist injuries, increase productivity and give myself another level of control over my line work. For those of you who don’t know, a Cintiq is basically a large computer screen that you can draw directly onto, using a stylus that has over a thousand levels of pressure sensitivity! I feel nervous about buying it. It means that I’m totally serious about this graphic novel, about becoming a professional cartoonist. The graphic novel is moving along steadily. I just passed page 150 for the thumbnails. My greatest struggle right now is keeping a positive attitude. I wrote the story a long time ago, and it’s impossible for me to laugh at the jokes any more, or even feel for the characters. “What am I doing?” I ask myself, but still I keep stumbling forward. I did pencil and ink the first page of the story, however, and fortunately I can’t find anything to criticize about it. The style is simple yet solid, and I think I’ll be able to maintain it for the entirety of the book. Best of all, the entire page only took me about three and a half hours to draw! That means I’ll be able to plow ahead at a rate of two pages a day when the summer hits. By graduation I’d like to have all the pages thumbnailed. Then I’ll send them all in to the publishers to check over, as well as the first page for them to do test prints. Excelsior. | 2 comments, Add Comment
May 4, 2009 9:37 pm
May 4, 2009 9:39 pm
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