Thursday, March 10
First thing's first - this happened:
Incredibly, I see this couple walking around my neighborhood with some frequency, and this is actually the second time I've seen them do this. The first time was something like two years ago.
I took a two-week break from comics to just catch up on my commercial work, and now I'm trying to get back in a regular pattern again. (I spent most of February losing my mind in order to get the last issue of my comic to the printer on time.) Today, it's just a one-pager for a series Ines Estrada and Ginette Lepalme edit. I base the joke ("joke"?) off a conversation I have with my buddy Ryan. Here's how one of my scripts generally looks like, as well as the finished page:
Focusing on illustration was kind of like a vacation from the more labor-intensive comics work. For instance, I forgot how nice it was to, like, enjoy drawing a character without having to worry about whether or not I'll still enjoy drawing him one hundred more times in slightly different poses. Being, say, one third finished on a comic can be the worst. You're too far into the project to feel like you can throw everything out and start from scratch, but not nearly close enough to being finished to have any real sense of how the final product will read.
So this is how today went, which is about an average "work day": personal work and comics in the morning, commercial gigs at night, junk food interspersed throughout.
11am-3pm - drawing comics
3pm-4pm - get some "fresh air" - buy junk food for lunch, hit up the 50-cent bin of a comic shop around my corner
4pm-8pm - drawing comics
8pm-11pm - coffee, Bitondo's, the internet
11pm-4:30am - freelance work
Here's the stash from the bin:
I like these Steve Leialoha pages from Vortex #8:
I stayed up pretty late afterwards basically watching the Al Jazeera stream in horror. I end up refreshing news feeds until the morning to confirm the Philippines wasn't going to be too affected by the tsunami. (I have relatives in Manila.)
Michael DeForge is an artist and illustrator, and the creator of Lose.
