OJJA WOJJA . . . ( comic WIP )

The continued adventures of Ghost Horse Goes Zoom Zoom, thought this was a kinda neat page without any characters/text but still pretty neat to look at!

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Looking at these three (lol) steps, I feel like for someone actually curious about the comic-making process, there might be some questions about going from my initial layouts to the pencils I actually ended up using. 

You might notice my note that those initial pencils are from 2019 and that they feature a horse and why change it up so much?? I'm not like... defending myself or anything here, just this process snapshot made me think about what my creative problem solving might look like to an outside person on this book in particular.

So in theory, I would be using my 2019 layouts in place of my new pencils- like they are effectively the same step of the process. Sometimes I'll do thumbs, which is what I consider quite loose, zoomed back page layouts/shot setups, then when I get to the individual page, I'll do tighter pencils that fill out some of the anatomy and details in each panel better.  Even though I work digitally and end up doing a lot of chair-legging anyway as I go, the idea is that when I get to the inking stage, all the planning is done and I'm just (lol) filling in the physical blanks of a page. 

I can't say I never rework layouts when I get to them for inking because I definitely do! But this book has been an immense undertaking for me in a lot of ways. It's about twice the length of any series I've worked on up to this point, the production timeline functions differently than it would with single issue comics, and I was dealing with burnout alongside a literal mental breakdown all in the period that I've been working on it. I jokingly refer to this book as "the project that never ends" as -both in good humour and in seriousness- I feel like a totally different person than I was when I started on it, and especially than when the pitch for the book got green lit back in 2017.

So I guess the short answer to "why change this entire page which you already planned out and looked fine?" is just... "stuff changes".

It took me a really long time to puzzle out what the setting for this part of the story was going to even look like and that ended up being totally different from what I vaguely had in mind back in the initial planning; I was kinda out of steam already when I was at this chapter in 2019 and remember just pushing myself to get lines on the page and be done with that step, which is why, to me, the original idea feels really bland now. 

In a more positive light, I feel like I've consumed media in the last two years that helped me evolve my concepts for the back end of this book and, for better or worse, that's not something you can force! I've been reading a lot more books and playing indie games that have definitely helped inspire my work, not to mention, y'know, going outside in the light of day on a regular basis. Really helped with my tree drawing skills imo XD

I like sharing these process breakdowns with you because I think it's neat seeing how, even if I struggled, I made something out of nothing and hey, it ended up pretty okay! I would say that these jumps in planning and the huge gap between initial pencils and finished inks isn't "normal" in this sort of work, even for a 200 page book, but in a kinda philosophical way the jump from step 1 to step 2 is reflective of repairing my relationship with my work and getting better at existing as something other than a... Sad Person Who Draws All the Time. 

I'm soclose to being done this book and even thought it stresses me tf out to think just how long it's taken, I'm so proud of what I've accomplished and what I can do next after this huge milestone ♥