The Anaether

Here’s a very short 4-page comic that I did because I wanted to expand a bit on the moment depicted in my last completed illustration.

I haven’t quite decided whether I’m going to include it in the comics section of this site. Well, it is at least on Webtoons and Tapas.

I wrote in detail about my process of these 4 pages on my Patreon. I was still experimenting a bunch and trying to make it so that the process was way faster. I was able to complete these pages in 2 weeks, which is fast for me. But I’m not entirely sure if I really am actually faster. I might have just been really single-minded about it since I worked on it just about every single day from when I started about 2 weeks ago. I also kept slipping back into making everything basically more full value in color and shading. But perhaps it helped that the beginning and end of this project were not far from each other. The middle of a given project always slows me down for some reason. Starting something new and finishing something is always exciting, but the middle always feels like such a slog. I hope I can train myself to stop feeling that way and just enjoy the whole process as much as possible.

I tried to be faster by copying and pasting more, leaving the lines sketchy and not fussing so much about the background environments. I keep telling myself “Okay, no more 2-hours-per-panel tirades on backgrounds” but it’s kind of difficult for me to pull away from this insistence on over-working the details. I keep forgetting that once I scale these pages down, the details are lost anyway. I think people rarely zoom all the way in for comic pages, they’re just more interested in the storytelling. I don’t think people will really notice how much I’ve copied and pasted. I always feel shame when I do that, but I really do want to tell my story before I’m dead. I’m kind of terrified of not working fast enough. I really want to stop working harder just for the sake of it because up to a certain point there’s diminishing returns.

I also want to be able to open up to any random page in my comic series and feel really satisfied with my work, and some part of me insists that this requires full colors and shading.

Well, given that probably most people are perfectly fine with a moderate amount of copying and pasting and simpler background imagery in comics, I really feel as if each page really can be produced in a day. But given my current work schedule, more like once every 3 days, which is still good. But only if I actually work at the pages every single day.

I’m sure I’ve been saying the same thing over and over again, I guess I’m in constant need of saying stuff that keeps me going.

I also keep saying I’m getting back into comic pages. Well, making promises is meh to me, as you might know by now from all my blog posts. But I’m sure I’ll be posting more work anyway. I daydreamed a bit about completing the prototype chapter by doing basic math. Given the pace that I had for these 4 pages I posted here, I could have the rest of the prototype chapter finished by this September or October. But that of course is assuming I only work on these comic pages instead of stopping all the time to make some related illustration. I actually really wish I didn’t.

Also there’s my supposed monthly obligation thing that pulls me away from The Anaether but I almost always put that off now. I was planning on doing it this week buuut, I kind of just see what happens. It’s pretty likely I’ll just put it off again to work more on Anaether-related stuff. We’ll see.

Thanks for your patience.