Friday, December 01, 2006

SUPERGIRL


So I've been in a serious pit of despair about drawing recently.

It's totally all deadline driven and all about me biting off more than I can chew. And while I heard an amusing anecdote talking about always biting off more than you can chew, and chewing like buggery... well I did that for 8 weeks before I crashed and burned (burnt?).

Basically, 50+ hour weeks at the gym and 30 hours of drawing took its toll after 8 weeks. The problem was that based on my schedule of 3 pages per week, I realised that dropping the ball on a page, or even half a page was unrecoverable. There was no way I could step up to 3.5 or 4 pages per week to make up that lost page. Doing so would totally kill me.

So after I dropped a page, I got totally depressed. I knew I'd blown the deadline. That lead to another and another being dropped until the whole thing became so futile, I was basically immobolised by despair.

One of my best buddies, Mitch suggested that I just chill out and try to enjoy my drawing. To be honest, it had been a while since I had enjoyed anything I'd drawn. While I had gotten great satisfaction out of drawing Zero-G, it had also been really stressful. Mitch's advice came when my production manager, Lauren initiated a conversation with Spacedog publisher, head-honcho and all-round cool guy, Roger Mincheff to basically put the book out when I can get it out. We've pulled the rate back to 2 pages per week, but I'm helping Annette tone the art the way that I did it on the Emperor pages.

The results should be spectacular. Our rationale was that while we don't have the promotion of San Diego behind us, we will have one of the best looking books on the market.

As a token of thanks (and a means to lube up the drawing side of my brain again), I busted out this Supergirl in one night for Mitch's bday. It was so nice to finish a piece again. It's heavily inspired by the Adam Hughes Supergirl he did recently. It's not a patch on his, and there's so much more I'd like to do, but one night was the most time I could spend on it before I had to get stuck back into Zero-G.

NEXT: Phase panel 2.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

she needs a hat

jasonb said...

LMAO!!!!

bitch!

=)

Anonymous said...

wow she looks gorgeous. That's an extraordinary workload, I'm glad it's a little saner now.

jasonb said...

Thanks Liz!

I can't tell you how refreshing it was just to finish a piece in one night. I'm gonna start posting the odd Zero-G panel as soon as I finish with the Phase stuff.