I’ve told people that I wasn’t interested in making shorter works, like making short films. I believe this sentiment was mostly driven by economic needs (short films don’t make money), but this sentiment also caused my skills to be left wanting. I did do a few though.
Between Enter Cedar and my next project, Where the Highway Meets the Corridor , there is a handful of smaller stories that happen. As I explore color and water mediums, I revisited an older piece. It was fun. I’ll probably “rerelease” these pieces once I’m done posting the last pages of Enter Cedar.
I have a new friend. They do poster art professionally. They’re work shows a great deal of enthuesiasm. I visited them last week and they showed a bunch of their work to me. You really feel like they enjoy the process when you look at their stuff. It made me reflect on my own work, and how much I don’t enjoy it sometimes.
My own work makes me think of the quote “I hate writing, I love having written” by Dorothy Parker. I think of this phrase often, as a lot of my process is driven by the need to produce anything. It’s driven by hitting a quota, because the fear of becoming unfocused and moving on before the project is finished is paramount.
This led me to reflect on how much I miss animation, and I spent a whole day considering the idea of adding a 30 second animated teaser for each comic project. I’m not an animator, so these projects would be limited, probably involving a lot of “squigglevision” style (which I’m a big fan of). But still, it would require a lot. I’ve probably spent a good 6 months on this particular project, and it’s not done.
But I spent most of the day considering whether or not to purchase After Effects and a few plugins, as I have other animated teaser ideas for my other projects. I think a few years ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice, and would have impulse purchased After Effects. But this time, I wrote out my projects, and my wants, and came to the conclusion that with the labor and skill available, adding animation would be untenable.
But it really sucks to walk away from the ambition of that. Which brings me back to enthusiasm, but enthusiasm within the scope of what can be done. I would love to get to the point where my work reflects how much I think and adore the characters, places and ideas in my scripts and comics.
Like, “Enter Cedar”, I knew that these characters had names, but I never took the time to discover them until this week. I was drawing them uniquely, they’ve had personalities, but I was rushing through the illustration of pages and not taking the time to discover what those names were. Perhaps it’s these areas I should make more time for.
