Comment by egypturnash
8 days ago
Art can turn into work too. Spending ~4-5y on a solo graphic novel[1] was mostly about finding that routine of making sure to spend a few hours of every workday working on the comic instead of just faffing about aimlessly.
What gave you the idea to write a graphic novel in the first place? What's your workflow?
I'm an artist and telling a story is a fun way to give structure to the eternal question of "what do I draw next".
Sometimes the art comes first, sometimes the words come first, ultimately they all end up with a rough draft of both in an Adobe Illustrator file that gets refined into a final page, and then I make another file in the same directory, and another, and another, and another, until there's enough to be worth considering printing a book. Sometimes I realize I just have to sit down and figure out what the next hundred pages are gonna be shaped like before I can go back to worrying about what this chapter's gonna be shaped like, or what the current page needs to do. Really it's the same shape as any creative process: make a quick, messy version, ask yourself what's the easiest/most obvious thing to do to make it better, repeat that step until you're satisfied with it and/or the deadline hits.
An important part of the process is also directing interested people to my crowdfunding (https://comradery.co/egypturnash, https://www.patreon.com/egypturnash) so I can afford to keep drawing pages instead of seeking other work. :)