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| I'm special (special)... so special |
I'm working on my graphic-novel-thingee, and I guess I'm making progress. I mean, I AM making progress. Occasionally I get all flustered and worried and spend a really long time playing with texture brushes and color schemes, neither of which I really need to worry about right now.
Which leads me to another issue: I've gone digital.
Not completely, of course. I've tried that, but I always missed pencil and paper too much. But I'd say, for this comic, it's about 80% digital work.
There are practical reasons, sure. Like, my scanner is standard-sized and I'd like to work bigger but NOT have to scan things in pieces (which I hate). Also, you know, I tend to be a little more experimental when working digitally, so that arguably means that I get a more ambitious final product.
I don't know.
It's weird, but I worry that I'm losing something. I don't know what. Like, a crunchy appeal that I see with my analog stuff because it's so much less polished?
After a lot of hand-wringing, I finally decided that my main goal was to tell the damn story, and I tend to be more efficient when I go digital, for whatever reason.
This is probably me just worrying again, unnecessarily, and freaking myself out. I know this.
That doesn't stop me from wondering whether or not my comic is going to look too polished or same-y. And whether keeping things analog would've made the pages more interesting and distinct, because God knows my artwork isn't going to do that.
Ahem.
So then, I run to my analog supplies, convinced that making comics in a way that's currently less popular is going to be a shortcut to making interesting art.
I think we both know that's bullshit, but there you go. The truth, of course, is that it's about working hard and challenging yourself, not worrying constantly about being unique. That kind of thinking leads to paralysis.
I guess the basic issue here isn't "digital versus analog." The whole thing just plays upon a really basic fear that I (and I think most artists) have--whether the stuff I do is unique or, you know, good.
Whatever the hell that's supposed to mean.
I've gone analog. I'm doing all my drafting and brainstorming and experimental scene-writing in a huge notebook with color-coded page sections. This way I don't have to worry, while I'm writing a scene, what I'm going to call the file name and whether I'll ever see it again and whether I should delete it at some point.
ReplyDeleteNo kidding? That's brilliant. I mean, there's something so nice about having a THING. Maybe it forces a kind of simplicity, since you're not worrying about digital crap like file names and folders and blah blah blah.
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