So, if you have seen Talent Not Guaranteed or followed my "art" Instagram, you know that I have been ramping up my cartooning practice as I settle into semi-retirement. Well, we're about to accelerate the ride just a bit.
I have been participating in a number of online activities sponsored by the Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) out of Gainesville, Florida. Joining a community of folks interested in comics and cartooning as been a great help in establishing a consistent practice, and I have benefited from several specific instances of sharing in a very tangible way.
Some members of SAW have spearheaded a project called SAWgust. It is essentially a comics version of NaNoWriMo - participants take one month to complete a project that stretches them. The prose "novel"that is the goal of NaNoWriMo is pretty clear - 50,000 words in a row. This definition also makes it easy to track daily progress, individually and communally.
SAWgust is a little different. Since comics, cartoons, and graphic novels/memoirs/whatevers can take many different forms, and since creators work in many different modes (pencil the whole thing/ink the whole thing vs. pencil a page/ink a page and digital vs. analog, for example) it's a little more complicated. So all the players are identifying their goals pretty explicitly and tracking progress (or not) however they like. After all, the goal is not to build metrics, but to do the art.
My own goal is pretty ambitious: I want to create a 24-page (printable/publishable) zine about Selkie, the cat who has shared our lives for the past 16 years. I have the whole thing scripted out and thumbnailed...
...and I have been working on some of the trickier bits and identifying which panels will need to be lightboxed for consistency.
I am anticipating that the project will require a solid six to seven hours a day at the drawing table. Luckily, Coco has two all-day weekend workshops,which will give me some nice chunks of uninterrupted time to plaster over any cracks.
Hopefully, we'll have a nice product at the end of it all.
It all starts tomorrow morning - wish me luck!
2 comments:
Good luck! Sounds like a fine project. Reminds me of the 24-hour comic, which I should try someday.
Thanks, Will. The first day went well, anyway!
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