Experiment (first six panels)

I've been drawing on index cards for a while now, as folks who follow me on social media are well aware (which is...most, if not all of you out there?). I started buying index cards to use for story and page breakdowns for comic scripts, and like most artists who have blank paper in front of them, I started doodling on them when I got bored or was on the phone or waiting for something to upload or scan. It became a bit of a habit, and a quick,  no-frills way of communicating to my followers on my Instagram. 

Recently people started asking about buying some of these card drawings, and I've started selling them on the site. I just don't want to turn that into something that's work and not fun, because the idea was to just draw freely, often without a plan at all, with little or no penciling and a lot less finessing and fussing with it. Drawing, for me, is stressful, and using the index cards has been a way to draw with a lot less worry, because it's just me goofing around.

The "experiment" I've been doing with the cards is to try to put together a story by drawing images that will eventually link up in some way. I have a loose idea of a story in my head but no structure, no real cast, just a few wisps of ideas, mostly visual, which I'm turning into comic panels on index cards. 

The cards help keep my drawing loose because they're cheap and small and...informal is the word that comes to mind, although I don't think that's an art term or anything. But I can ruin a bunch of them in a row and not care about it, and not care about perfectly dark black inking, or any exactness or obsessing over a drawing, even if it's detailed. I'm trying not to use a ruler on anything, as well. The cards also ground me to a degree, because each card being a standard panel means I don't have to think about page layouts and things that can bog me down like I'm Mort Meskin with a blank slate. 

I'm not writing a script or doing thumbnails. If I ever get around to lettering this, I'll drop it in digitally -- and if it gets to that stage maybe I will need to do some pre-planning to link sequences together at the joints. It's a lot of big ifs. But for now it's just  image-based, snapshots in my head that I try to transfer quickly to the cards. I do one every once in a while, I try not to stress working on them, and then I toss the finished new one on the pile. There's no real order to them at this point.

I have a title for the project, and you can see from the images what kind of story it is, but what is going on exactly is still mostly a mystery. I don't have character names, or a town name, or any of the things I usually have worked out in detail when I try to make a comic. I know a few things, or think I do, but I'm trying not to dwell on it too much, hoping a lot of it will fall into place as the drawings pile up. I'm not betting any money that I'll finish this or it'll turn into something decent, but even if it trails off, I'll have a bunch of weird drawings on my hands that I enjoyed working on. 

It's something to do when I don't know what to do.