Watching things come together.

I enjoyed a truly amazing artistic experience recently; something I have never had the chance to experience before. I scanned all my pages, approximately twenty at this point, and got them all cleaned up and laid out in InDesign. Suddenly I went from having pile of loosely connected ink drawings to having a nearly completed book. And there it was in front of me, the page spreads opened wide like the welcoming arms of a long lost friend. As I scrolled through the pages it really struck me for the first time how much work was sitting in front of me. Each of these pages takes me somewhere between twenty and forty hours of work (forty is a very unlucky page, twenty is the goal that I'm working towards for all my pages) and there they all were, starting to look like something that might get finished someday.

Some context is in order to explain how this experience had never come about before. About six years ago I wound up putting together thirty of more pages of work of comic strips for a newspaper comic that I created. They were roughly connected and certainly never put together into any kind of a book. During college I had a number of classes with large portfolios of work that were almost entirely unrelated except that they were mostly done in the same medium. I suppose finishing a sketchbook does also contain some of that same satisfaction but it isn't nearly the same in terms of impact. And late in my college career I completed forty or more pages of work for a web comic that I created which has now also gone the way of the dinosaur. It also was never collected into a book of any length, although looking back on it there was a lot there that I am still proud of. But still, it had no real plot structure. There was a small story arc contained in those pages and I suppose if we want to stretch our imaginations we could all play pretend together that there was a complete thought in there, but without the help of a certain someone I don't know if even I am that creative.

So why all this backstory? Simply to illustrate the point that, until now, I had not worked on a project for this long that had this much focus, and now that I'm approaching a truly significant milestone it is really quite rewarding to have stuck it out. Seeing those spreads is what brought it on home to me and I wanted to share that.

I'm not there yet though, so you can expect that by sometime next month I'll have noticed that I haven't posted for a while and I'll come back and give you an update on how it all comes together.