Vlog! 20170709 - Back from Yukon :) (Patreon)

Okay! Hello patrons it is Sunday night.  I'm back in Vancouver back from my adventure in the Yukon.

I had a lot of fun out there... I took a ton of notes as I mentioned, while I was on the plane (here I'll show you guys). Some of these... I managed to get a [this is more hourlies...] but I managed to get the whole comic laid out that I'd like to do. I think I mentioned this in the previous video but I've been taking extensive notes about what had been going on in the Yukon. Sometimes I would take down thumbnails and just drawings of things that were, I thought, remarkable while was there. This is the layout of a building that I was in but didn't manage to snap a picture of .... and here's little sketches of animals that I saw while I was out there. But I've been taking pretty extensive notes and then at the end I started jotting out little memories.

So these are like almost half-thumbnails. I didn't quite get them together into the point where they're thumbnail version yet...  but it's snippets of conversations that I want to make sure I don't forget. And then after that I have some more notes... different types of dogs. Yeah. [So I'm trying to see where this part happened]. Yeah, so it's this part here! Then after all of the notes I tried to write down in order what I wanted the comic to look like, and then that culminated in this. So I decided to start with a-- as I mentioned last week, I want to do more travel comics and I want to approach it with the a different tactic. And so this is me taking my travel experiences and composing it back into something that's a little bit more of a storytelling aspect. So I started with a 24 page layout which is... y'know...a good size for a comic and I basically laid out the story beats of what I wanted to explore if I was going to turn this experience into a comic. And then at the end I shuffle things around a little bit and I think I might add a page or two here and there which is... you know... turning a five day journey into an over 24-page comic which is... quite a thing! Like, it's impressive that I could get that much story out of it and that was one of the frustrating things about the travel comics that I made before... is that I felt I was leaving a lot on the table. But now I don't feel like I am. After this I'm -- in the next couple of days I'm hoping I can jot down the rest of the thumbnails before I forget and then I will be able to sleep on that for a little while. And what I'm doing right now is Beyond.

So I... unfortunately part of travel and timing and trying to figure out how to get all of your work to fit where you need it to... when I'm travelling I can't work on my tablet. I've been doing all my inking digitally on the Cintiq.  So I had to postpone all of that work for when I came back and then this whole weekend I worked on Beyond. I was very lucky that Sfé -- they were able to finish all of their pencils while I was gone. They put a really big amount of energy out towards that and so now everything is lined up for me to work on and I'm trying to respond to that by putting a lot of energy into it right now. Hoping that I can get through to the end of the 17 page comic in my next stage of inks maybe by the end of this week...? We'll see. I'm really not sure that could be possible there's a lot of pages still between here and there. [I've got it on my wall laid out... I've got two-four-...six pages left to ink.] So we'll see! That's a lot. And after that I can get feedback from Sfé and then move them into final inks... which is a lot of rendering and detail that needs to go into it. But the comic's been going really well so far. I'm really proud of it. I think it's a really powerful piece and it's a piece that I'm really happy to be involved in. So it's a lot of work but it's work that I'm excited to be doing.

And what else... I need to scan and post the hourlies that I was working on. I think I posted that one before but I did another page... So I mentioned before that my strategy with the hourlies was gonna be a little bit different as well. Same kind of thing where I took my notes and took photos that I'm turning it into a comic. The pro and con as your-- the nice thing about hourly comics usually is that they have an immediacy to them because you are doing them in the moment, you don't really have a choice to go back and fix your mistakes. You kind of have to dedicate it to the page really quickly. And I always thought that was something that was a bit of a disadvantage in an hourly and I'm kind of seeing--- I'm seeing the point of doing it in in situ so to speak. Doing it hour by hour... after a couple of days I kind of already lost interest in this day just because this is a random day right? That's kind of the point of hourlies is that they are capturing a random day but.. the flip side of that is that random days are not that compelling so I don't feel a great amount of urgency to work on it, but I am pushing myself to it. And the other drawback is I have to go through all of my normal stages of comicking. Which, you know, I lay it out and I have my pencils, and then I ink it and then I erase that and then I do this rendering... it's just a lot of stages and a lot more work than I would normally put into an hourly comic. But it's because I want to do it right for Patrons, I want to make it something that's really special and worth looking at and I'm pretty happy with the way this rendering is turning out so far. In the forest with the grey marker and this is inktense pencil... I think that effect is really turning out. 

So I'll be posting those this week. What else is going on? I think that's it! I will be checking in with you guys soon as I can... have a great one, I will see on the Internet :) Baiee