mish-mashed sort-of 24 hr comic day thingy

My 24 hr comic starts a day early and will probably end up being more like 12 hours spread out over two days. We'll see. (Update: It ended up being 25 hrs spread out over 3 days!) Also, I am breaking the official rules by using a piece of flash fiction, "Song In My Bones", written by Jaym Gates as my script. Pretty dang excited to do that too, so there.

(For a bit more about the project I direct you to my Functional Nerds post and John Remy's Mind on Fire post.)

Alright, let's do this.

*******

Day 1:
6am. I had set the alarm for 4:30am... but...... Anyhow. Doing some initial panel layouts before spawn gets up and I get him off to school. So, assembling my tools. I will be this digitally, getting inspiration from a few comic technique books and the comic adaptation of Stephen King's Dark Tower. (Big thank you's to Carrie Cuinn & mfranti for the books!)
6:46 am. got the basic template laid out in Ps. and started character studies. (realizing how much time I spend doing characters studies... I'll have to be careful about that). Okay, stopping here, will start again after spawn is off to school
8:45 am. Spawn at school, next 8 hrs: DRAWING!

10:00 am. have Jaym's characters sketched out. now on to paneling out the storyline.
12:30 pm. Over two hours later, and I've only roughed (REALLY rough) out three pages.
1:30 pm. A dialogue-heavy page made my head spin a bit (writers, always using WORDS)... but I think i got it nailed (er, as in, really roughly sketched out...) Lunch now, then moving on.

4:00pm. Six pages, *almost* roughed out: word bubbles placed, rough sketch of panel content.... I think there will only be 8 pages total in this comic~ I didn't script it all out page by page before hand, just doing it as I go. My bad. But I think it will work regardless.

5pm. Rushed to finish pg 7 (which included the mouth-full-of-bloody-splatter panel that I have been looking forward to drawing this whole time). Now time to get my spawn, do the dinner/evening routine. Be back to drawing later this evening.

7:30. Dinner made, ate, cleaned up. Spawn entertaining himself with legos. Time to draw again.

10pm. Spawn is in bed and Jaym's story has now been completely quick-sketched into 10 pgs. Now I'll find out how much steam I have left to bring it all together.


12midnight. Just ran out of steam. But polished up pg1 and part of pg 2. Family coming into town tomorrow, may not get to the rest of the page until Sunday. We'll see.
DAY 2:
7:30 am. Not sure how much I'll get done to day. Little bits here and there between family stuffs. But right now, getting a few minutes in, while we all sit around the table involved in our own projects.
Also, a glimpse at pg 2. One of the reasons I chose this story: Jaym wrote some pretty amazing body-and-bone imagery.
11:30 am, Day2. Have spent the morning doing laundry, cleaning the toilet, helping spawn w/ homework... and also drawing. Three pages are now "finished" (tho I want to go back and add grey-scale values, not just b&w.) Now heading out to a family gathering that will probably last the rest of the day. Hope to get back and finish this before tomorrow ends.

12Midnight, Day2. Home from family gathering, my body has informed me that I, in fact, do NOT have the energy to work on this anymore today.

Day3
6am, Day3. Getting a few more hours of drawing in before going back for more family gathering action.

9am, Day3. Final drawing done on 5 out of the 10 pages now. Will come back to it after spending a few final hours w/ out-of-town family.

2pm. Day3. Family has been kissed, hugged, and sent home to their various distant destinations. Settled in now to finish this thing.

11pm. Day3. DONE. Well... except I want to go and add grey scale and do some clean up. But that will come later. I just tallied up my hours: 25 hrs (approx) spread out over 3 days. /Whew!

here's the Flickr Set and slideshow, as well as my +google album.

24 hr Comic Day

(cross posted from Functional Nerds)

An invitation to the 8th annual 24 Hour Comic Day: This Saturday, October 1.

The dare: To complete a 24 page comic book in 24 continuous hours.

Back in 1990 comic artist Scott McCloud thought of a creative exercise to improve his drawing speed. He decided to challenge himself (and fellow comic artist Steve Bissette) to draw a complete 24 page comic book in 24 hours.

McCloud recalls that first venture:

"Feeling increasingly alone and silly, I called Steve to see how he was coming along on his comic to discover he couldn't do it that day after all because of family obligations. This made me feel even more alone and silly of course, but I kept going anyway."

Since that first solitary experiment (which you can view here) the challenge has taken off to become a bit of a phenomena with many notable artists and writers participating. Also, it is not longer a solitary event:

"On April 24, 2004, the first annual "24 Hour Comics Day" (more comics, fewer hyphens!) took place at comics stores all over the country, producing thousands of pages of comics in a single weekend. By 2007, the celebration had grown to events in 18 countries, involving over 1,200 artists and an estimated 20,000+ pages of comics."

For more information about participating in the "official event" check out this interview with ComicsPRO executive director Amanda Emmert, and see here for the rules and requirements (and various noble failure options). This Saturday it's gonna be happening all over the place, maybe near you? (And if not, you could get one going.:))

A few years ago, John Nakamura Remy invited me to do this with him and a few friends. Our version was a scaled down 18hr deal which we shared with each other via twitter, blogs, and flickr. See the invitations here and here; Final products here and here.

Now we're gonna do it again. My personal variation this time around: I'm going to start Friday and will be breaking a rule by using a short story written by Jaym Gates. I plan to have it turned into a 12 (ish) page comic by sometime early Saturday (before family arrives from out of town). Feel free to join in using whatever parameters best fit your life and your creative goals.

John and I will be sharing the process via twitter (@johnremy, @galendara and hashtag #24HCD) and google+ ( @John Dewey Nakamura Remy, and @Galen Dara).

So there you go! Collect your art supplies, your ideas, a stock pile of microwavable food & caffeine, and join us for a 24 Hour Comic Day!

Traitors and Tyrants FINISHED.

THIS JUST IN: All 22 pages of the graphic novel Traitors and Tyrants, written by John Nakamura Remy (set for publication later this month in the forthcoming anthology Monsters and Mormons).... ARE NOW FINISHED!

Seriously, I cannot wait for you to read this comic: John created something extraordinary with this alt-history tale of highly trained polygamist sister-wife super-spies.

Now, I have all SORTS of stuff I'd love to share about what I learned, the process, pros and cons of doing it in such a concentrated amount of time... But I'll save that for later. (Still rather tired at the moment).

Instead, I'll just give you a small work-in-progress glimpse at one particular two page spread that I completed in 12.5 hrs. (Which was sort of a record, many of them took 20 hrs or more.)

******

DAY 1:
Approximately 1 hour in: Panels are finally in place with initial sketches & word bubble placement:

4.5 hours later, I'm about half way through the first page:

6 hrs in and I am *ALMOST* done with the first page... *ALMOST*.


8.5 hours in and I am halfway through the second page. (Unable to push any further, I crash into bed.)


DAY 2:
Get up the next morning ready to go back at it... After three hours (11.5 hrs total) the two pages are *ALMOST* done:


Finally, at about 12.5 total drawing hours, these two pages are finally finished: (So I moved right on to the next two page spread :) )

At that point, of course, John had to go back and fix all my typos and choose a better font than what I was using. 'Finished' is rather relative.

BTW... a serious big thank you to Bear Weiter for helping me figure out the ps Pen tool: that helped immensely in so many of these scenes.

Also, see here, here and here, for a tiny taste of some of the other amazing stories that are going to be in this anthology. Yummy!

More to come about it all later. Meanwhile... I need to try remember what I did with myself when I was not drawing every spare minute of ever day. Hmmmmm......

247 days in. (No 365 this year)

This sketchbook now spans one full year. Aug '10 to Aug '11. (Here, from just over a year ago, when I was preparing to make the jump to this book.) I've marked this period on the edge of the pages in red and black: noting the passage of time in visual ways being a personal quirk.
Wonder how long it will take to fill the remaining pages? Almost two thirds of the way through right now. Here's what the one year page looks like (not a planned page, just the randomness of how the marks fall):

This year filled up good and well with so many real art jobs that the 365 exercise is indefinitely on the back burner. But here's the set with what I have done and continue to do in sketchbooky marking making, for this year.