Development Diary - Jun 2019 (Patreon)

Harrow!

Last weekend, I finally started inking the first page of Meatier Showers 2019, with much trepidation. It had been a long while since I last inked a comic page, and it requires me to be in a specific head space to get right. Then there's the pressure of trying to get the page fully inked within the day itself, if not it'll end up rolling over to the following weekend (when a new page can be worked on instead.)

Despite my best efforts, the inevitable happened. At the end of "fixing" and inking page 1, having seen the new results, it suddenly dawned upon me that the original page was a lot better than what I had produced:

For the casual observer, the above page seems "fine" and pretty cleaned up for that matter. However, compared to the original layout and designs I had, the new page layout is relatively much more claustrophobic than I had intended it to be. It made me realize that Meatier Showers isn't the sort of comic where I want to over-complicate things, not especially when it comes to the visual aspect. My personal preference is for the dialogues and visuals to flow and read easily, because ultimately Meatier Showers is the kinda of comic I personally would pick up to chill and have a good time with.

Looking back at the original page, despite my original reasons in an earlier post. While it frustrates me that I took up a whole weekend to realize the problem, I suppose the session was a good warm up for inking, considering that I had been hesitating initially for fear of messing things up (I did anyway so...)

I can't help but express that I would very much love to work on my project on a more regular basis (although that kind of unpaid freedom comes with great risks.) For now, I've scaled down my main goal for the year to come up with 6 solid, full-colored pages, rather than rushing things through and trying to hit some arbitrary deadline. Given my weekday commitments, it's a zero-sum game trying to constantly engage the internet. This is the stability and compromise I've settled for in life, to realize the goal of having my own home.

That said, I have drafted some thumbnails on the next story-arc involving Tanz and Groover, just so I still have direction and a trajectory to aim for. I've also worked out a 32-page format to get a better sense of what the "big picture" and through line of this new series. For now, I hope to attempt page one again this coming Sunday. Fingers crossed I'll arrive at something more satisfactory this time.

Snares,
Jun 2019