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Writing notes
I came up with this idea on a plane, when I had nothing else to do but draw.
“Make something, finish it” sounds simple, but has become a bit of a mantra. It really sums up the creative struggles and frustrations that I (and a lot of people) have. At the heart of it is knowing and accepting your limitations, whether that be time or ability or something else, and making whatever you can with what you have. In that sense while it is limiting, it is also freeing, because the thing you should make is whatever you feel like making, as long as you can finish it.
The other big inspiration for me was the feeling I get when looking over my old creative efforts. It is like going back in time and meeting a younger version of yourself, in a way that an old photo could never capture. And the things I am most proud of creating are also sometimes the cringiest, because those are the creative efforts that I really cared about and took the biggest swings on. Sometimes that meant falling flat on my face, and on occasion it meant hitting it into the carpark.
Speaking of taking swings, this is the first comic I have done that rhymes! The meter is not very sophisticated and reminds me of eenie meenie miny moe. I just took the phrase “make something, finish it” and see what else fit.
I’m not much of a poet but during the pandemic, I posted a bunch of poetry attempts on Instagram, accompanied by artwork from other artists (used with permission). I stopped doing those because I was getting very picky about which images to use, so I’ve long wanted to do my own images to accompany my own writing.
After a couple of years learning to draw, I feel like now I can. It ain’t pretty and takes forever but I can.
Art notes
So many firsts in this one:
– First comic I have done in pages and panels. Everything else I have done has been one panel, one image.
– First comic I have done entirely in screentone. Unfortunately, it doesn’t display very well on the blog (particularly on multiple devices) and to avoid serious moire issues, I had to display all tones as shades of gray.
