I'm an artist. Back in 1995 I started coming up with this dark urban fantasy, somewhat inspired by my unexpected homesickness when leaving New Orleans for Los Angeles. I ended up with an interesting setting and some flat characters.
The day of 9/11, the right lead walked into my head and started talking. I wrote down what she had to say and did the first drawings of her.
I made a few attempts at starting the thing, but I never got very far. Multiple attempts at the beginning, random story fragments. They started to form a narrative but some stuff was missing.
In the meantime I drew some other comics and a Tarot deck. Last year, late one night, I was hit by a new idea for this story. I wrote it down, looked at it, and realized it really tied a lot of the themes together at the climax. The ending was right, after seventeen years of it bouncing around my head. Soon after I did a few experiments at getting the rough, painterly look it's always had in my head in my artistic weapon of choice, Adobe Illustrator, and nailed it. My sketches looked pretty much exactly what I couldn't actually produce all those years ago.
This November, I made significant progress on the first draft of a full script for the whole thing. I didn't finish it but I have a complete skeleton, with flesh on its bones for the first few chapters.
And I think I'll be starting to draw it when my current comic is over sometime near the end of this year.
Some things just need a lot of underpinnings. I always knew I'd do it SOMEDAY. I just had to let it boil way way on the back burner for a decade, until I worked through all the real-life issues it's a metaphor for. And I am pretty sure at this point that it will be worth the wait.
When the time is right, your Forever Project will become the current project. And it will be awesome.
The day of 9/11, the right lead walked into my head and started talking. I wrote down what she had to say and did the first drawings of her.
I made a few attempts at starting the thing, but I never got very far. Multiple attempts at the beginning, random story fragments. They started to form a narrative but some stuff was missing.
In the meantime I drew some other comics and a Tarot deck. Last year, late one night, I was hit by a new idea for this story. I wrote it down, looked at it, and realized it really tied a lot of the themes together at the climax. The ending was right, after seventeen years of it bouncing around my head. Soon after I did a few experiments at getting the rough, painterly look it's always had in my head in my artistic weapon of choice, Adobe Illustrator, and nailed it. My sketches looked pretty much exactly what I couldn't actually produce all those years ago.
This November, I made significant progress on the first draft of a full script for the whole thing. I didn't finish it but I have a complete skeleton, with flesh on its bones for the first few chapters.
And I think I'll be starting to draw it when my current comic is over sometime near the end of this year.
Some things just need a lot of underpinnings. I always knew I'd do it SOMEDAY. I just had to let it boil way way on the back burner for a decade, until I worked through all the real-life issues it's a metaphor for. And I am pretty sure at this point that it will be worth the wait.
When the time is right, your Forever Project will become the current project. And it will be awesome.