Cosmic Jellyfish

In case you hadn't realised, BLIP is just... out there... somewhere in the cartoon galaxy. And this first encounter has been freeformed, rather than planned. I wanted to release myself from my usual regime, and let things develop in their own way. See, I have a rotten habit of over-analysing my work. I'll hone and hone and hone a project until, if I'm not careful, I've lost the creative spark that got me so excited about it in the first place and I'll drop the thing cold. As a consequence, I'm quite ridiculously guilty of never finishing things. Seriously. You should see my attic, stuffed to the rafters with projects started but ne'er to be finished. So here I've changed tack. I've thought about the basics and sketched out the slimmest of thumbnails. But for the most part, I've let my mind wander down whatever path it chooses, towards some sort of intergalactic conclusion that makes sense to me, at least. The aim being to just get drawing, pronto, and to GET SOMETHING FINISHED. In capitals, just like that. And I've adopted a handy motto/mantra, which I've printed out and stuck to the sloping ceiling above my desk:

Get it done.

Get it done.

Get it done.

Even so, at the end of last week, that ol' chisel of mine was out once more, chip-chip-chipping away at the conceit of my story. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't work. I could do this. I could do that. Oh, I was honing away alright, and I came perilously close to blinding my creative process again. I was all for tossing the thing aside and starting something new and exciting instead. But this time, I forced myself to keep on drawing, and what do you know, eventually, that funk began to clear. Come Tuesday I could see again. And lo and behold, it was obvious I was still on the right track, and had been all along.

Curse you, you artistic fog, you!

Mind you, you can surely forgive my uncertainty. I mean, this first BLIP strip already features swathes of signal-munching Space Lice. And now, well, I've only gone and thrown a jellyfish into the mix. Yes, indeed. A Great Cosmic Jellyfish. I told you this was a freeformed adventure...

Wee Beasties

So there's me, with my head in the stars, speculating on the interstellar exploits of a wee alien, when all the time I should have been looking closer to home for my inspiration. You see, we've got our very own little visitor, right here in our back garden. Whoever or whatever it is, has taken up residence in our olde wall. I say "olde" because it's Grade C listed, along with our house, so whoever it is, they have good taste. And they like rose hips. A lot.

That's quite a spoil heap. Our two Springers are drawn straight to it, whenever we open the back door - sniff, sniff, sniff - and that rose hip in the hole confirms there's an internal residence.

I'm guessing it's your common woodmouse, and I'm also guessing that he/she has brought a few familial companions with them, which means our own home is about to be over-run with the little blighters once more (It comes with territory, I'm afraid). But I'd love to know exactly who or what it is, and have taken to leaping out in to the dark each night, with my trusty flashlight ready to blind the culprit(s), mid-nibble. But all to no avail, thus far.

Actually, this visitation is quite timely, as I've now entered the final third of my first BLIP book, and my thoughts are turning towards the next adventure. There's going to be a lot more flora and fauna on show in that one, and juxtapositioning of size and scale... but I'll save the detail for another day...

Meanwhile, there's our own little visitor to ponder once more. And sniff.

Decompression

I'm no comic book fool. Before I began this Not-Particularly-Great Endeavour of mine I sketched my li'l story out in thumbnails, checking the flow of things, seeing what worked. But you know, in my head, I'm always editing. How can I streamline this? How can I take my adventure from Point A to B in the most efficient way? I'm all-too aware of that dreaded comics term "decompression" and it's burning bright, at the back of my mind, with every page I create.

For the uninitiated, "decompression" is a term applied to modern comics storytelling. Google it and you'll find lots of folks talking about it. It's all to do with the way today's comic artists tell their stories, st-r-e-t-ching out action via single panel pages and telling their tales via repeat panels with sparse dialogue, so that a 24-page modern comic can be read in a heartbeat, and all that it entails for publishers, blah-blah-blah.

Um. Kind of like I'm doing here.

Look, I'm so aware of what I'm doing it's almost painful. But in my case, this is my own comic experiment to create as I please. And if I want to stretch a wafer-thin encounter out over 48 pages, then I'll do just that, and you can't stop me. So there.

But, but, but the point of this blog post is that, even here, in this laid-back, self-created comic environment, I'm always thinking about the pacing of my tale, and how best to present it. And although those initial thumbnail sketches I made are essential, I'm still editing, even as I finish each page, so to help me I've taken to creating rather jolly finished thumbnail pages. I reduce 24 of my completed pages on to a single A4 page, so's I can look at them in sequence, checking the flow of the story and just as importantly, the mix of the colour scheme, all on one sheet. And it's been darned handy this week, because I've now looked at the finished article(s) and I've been able to edit out two whole pages of action and tone down a big shouty example of colour overload. I was on page 34. Now I'm on page 32. But my spacey tale flows a whole lot better, now I've condensed the action, and it looks better too, now that I've recoloured a panel. So there you go. It begins with thumbnails, and it ends with them too!...

Layers of difficulty

So far, I've been colouring BLIP using Photoshop layers. And there have been no problems . Drop each colour on a new layer, combine, and voila. I know there are quicker methods. I just like working this way. But when you up the ante, it can't half cause problems. Take a look at page 25:

I've got a number of pages like this. Dropping all of those colours on to different layers has proved tricky for this beginner, and once or twice, as I've shifted between layers I've found myself adding touches of the wrong colour to the wrong layer, and - the biggest sin - dropping colour on to my top layer, which floods the black line copy. I'm working at 400%, a lot of the time, and it's very easy to miss this kind of thing and realise too late that you've just saved your file in this flooded state. I did that twice on this page. I'm guessing it just takes practice, and it's all part of that big creative Learning Curve!...

New readers start here

Now that I've shown my hand at Toonhound, it seems a few new readers have hopped over to this blog to read up about my cartoon endeavours. So it probably makes sense to go back, right back, to the beginning and explain a bit more about what I'm up to with this BLIP project, and the thinking behind it.

I've set myself a task to create a 48-page Small Press comic, by the end of the year. Now, in the past, I've had the most dreadful habit of abandoning projects halfway through. Seriously, I've got umpteen unfinished creations scattered around my attic workplace. So BLIP is one final attempt to get me focused upon my prize. And to that end, I've set myself some stringant guidelines. I'm sticking to single-panel pages, with intermittant three-panelers. There's no dialogue, and currently, no fx sounds. And it's all being drawn in clean black and white, without shading, and scanned and coloured on Photoshop. That's because I find it all too easy to lose myself in a crosshatching haze. I can spend way-y-y-y too long on a page, if I'm not careful, scratching in background detail, and forever altering dialogue. So no shading, no dialogue or superfluous rubbish. I just want to be able to move page to page, quick as I can. That way, I can pick it up on a whim, inbetween the demands of Toonhound, the house, the dogs, and my always-forgiving wife. And there can be no excuses for not reaching my goal. Except that I've not used Photoshop like this before. Not for colour comics work. So that's another box I'm ticking as I go.

It helps that BLIP is a ridiculously simple concept, that fits the bill so precisely. Seriously, I'm jazzed about this one. It's all come together so neatly: What if there was an endless signal passing through the depths of space? And what if a little alien in a little bubble ship latched on to this signal? Where has the signal come from? What does it mean? And why has our little alien buddy latched on to it with such determination...?

I think you'll agree the possibilities here are endless. I know the answers, but I'm not telling, at least for a while. In the mean time, you'll just have to dig out the clues buried in the various cosmic encounters. And yes, I said "various" because I already have four 48-page adventures planned out, with far too many more swirling around in the creative ether. But I'm not jumping the gun. I've got to get this first Tall Tale out of the way. It's already October and I've only just reached the 30th page....

Pages & Buses

So here I am, struggling to work around conflicts of THE ZONE (see my previous post) and fighting a growing desire to just sweep my pad and pens and everything else associated with my current creation on the floor and give the thing up altogether, because I just can't clear my head of that all-pervading daily clutter, when all of a sudden, a page rush is upon me. Productivity comes at me like a blurr and before I know it, I've done three whole pages in one day. That's three pages drawn and inked and scanned, ready for colouring.

Wow.

It's like buses, isn't it? A trio of the darned things have trundled up to my attic bus stop, all in a row, after a barren week in which I've scoured the timetable fruitlessly. And today I'm already riding two more pages, all the way to Adobeville - Ding! Ding! - Goodness, the sense of release is almost tangible. And it's come just at the right time, when I was beginning to think my Magnum Opus was perhaps in danger of becoming a Magnum Hopeless. There's still a way to go, of course, but I'm approaching Page 30, and that's a pyschological barrier I've been eager to hurdle. This first BLIP book is a 48-page encounter, so - do the maths, folks - I'm beyond the half-way point now, and beginning to ease towards my second act conclusion and finale.

Of course, I really shouldn't get too excited. I've some big plans for said finale and they'll be mighty tricky to pull off (unlike that ridiculously simple page below). I'm sure there'll be a queue of pages stalling or breaking down completely on the roadside, as I progress. But this weekend has been a good weekend. The Conductor has ruffled my hair and waived my ticket!...

THE ZONE

With its (mostly) single panel pages, you can hardly call BLIP a complex comic project, but when you're juggling your creation around your endeavours at Toonhound, a busy home life and three nights of exhausting shift work a week to ensure the mortgage gets paid - well - that's when you find out just what a labour-intensive process this comic making mularky can be.

It doesn't help that I'm not that good at drawing. Sure, I can knock off a quick cartoon, but my technical skills and my ability to draw properly, they can be a bit lacking. And I'm hindered somewhat by having a slightly squiffy left eye that can drag my creations a little askew, at times. That's not to say I'm some dribbling one-eyed pirate. It's just a slight astigmatism that I have to work around. And if you add that to the above, you can see why, more and more, I find I have to be in THE ZONE before I can begin drawing. But finding THE ZONE can be a nightmare, at times, and it can be sent scurrying in to the shadows by the slightest of things: an ill-timed phone call, the dogs wanting out, my turn to cook, etc. Take young Stan here (below). Who can resist a face like his?

If you throw in my near-constant tiredness from all that shift work, you can begin to understand there are weeks when THE ZONE has fled the house altogether and vanished up the street. And it all means that my simple little project designed to get me focused on my cartooning is in danger of becoming a mammoth undertaking. And yet... in a strange way... I'm finding that the frustration of being out of THE ZONE has actually been a good thing. It's been a wake-up call. If I really want to do this cartooning thing full time - which I do, I know with the most absoloute certainty now - then I have to learn to keep on, no matter what. I can't go running after the security of my ZONE when there's a deadline to meet. THE ZONE won't put bread on the table. It won't feed the dogs and it won't pay for our little Georgian house to be properly renovated...