The thing about comics that always takes me by surprise… How long it takes! It seems I’m just endlessly fiddling with the pages, hours, days. Perhaps it is the nature of how I work. Not chronologically, but jumping around, working on several pages and panels at the same time. I do the same when I write, to very much the same effect: It feels like running in water. Getting nowhere.
But, as if it snuck up on me, suddenly there is the finish line – and I wonder what I was whining about. Until next time.
This particular project about magician Thomas Alsop is taking it’s sweet time too. I didn’t mean to spend so much time on it, but damn, I like the story and I want to do good. There are artist who seem to get away with less. For me, it’s like a picture gets burnt into my brain when I read the script, and I just know what it should look like – regardless of the time frame and the money involved. I can’t stop, until it looks like the picture in my head. And it never does. Not really. That image starts to wash away, once I start working on the drawing. It is the nature of the beast, elusive and ever changing.
Anyway, I’m trying to save time by doing inkwash on these pages, so the coloring process is quicker. Does it work? I don’t know, haven’t timed myself. Maybe I’m afraid of the result.