kirabug’s idea files

Mmmm, inspiration. I need to stop sucking so much and get some content rolling or I’m never going to get better. Thx to Hawk at Applegeeks for this one.

Secrets of greatness: Practice and hard work bring success.

Two things you might be interested in knowing, both of which are obvious:

1. Drawing is hard.
2. Drawing isn’t fun.

Writing is hard. When the characters aren’t speaking to you it’s really really hard. But for me, drawing is much harder even on a good day. That’s why I do it.

I’m 30 now and I find there are a lot of times that something is presented to me — especially things that were easy as a kid — and I can feel my mind rebel. That’s hard. Don’t you have a calculator? Why don’t you just do this easy thing instead? You don’t really need to understand that. For a while, probably five or six years, I avoided thinking things that weren’t easy for me. It became a big disadvantage because I have this stubborn block against math. I’m sure it’s too hard for me. But I used to add and subtract and multiply every day without pause and now I don’t. (You don’t do many multiplication tables in tech support.) And I found that suddenly, math is just as hard as I thought it was, even easy math, like 9+7. When you can’t decide if it’s 15 or 16, well, you feel silly. So I’ve deliberately been relearning my times tables and a lot of addition an subtraction. Made it up to 13×13 yesterday. Sounds crazy, especially if you’re young. How do you forget how to add? Well if you don’t practice, those skills just go away and get replaced by skills for something else, like, say, finding the remote control.

The blog part of this site is easy. Write words, check grammar, submit. I don’t really try. I write what I’m thinking and ignore the thesis aspect and move on. It’s lazy writing.

But the drawing is really really hard. There are times when I’m stealing from my own art and thinking that all I need to do is move Marin’s arm from here to here… and my brain says, ooh, that’s hard. can’t you rewrite the script instead? Nobody will notice if she hasn’t moved in three panels.

It still takes me four or five hours to draw even the simplest of panels from scratch. I can spend two hours on a hand and still have it come out looking like a claw. I admit, I often try to avoid it, and just draw what I absolutely have to. It’s hard. But ultimately, I do it.

And now people I know say I’m an artist, I can draw, I’m “good”, or at least “better than they are” and I sometimes laugh, or sometimes get annoyed. I’m awful, lazy, and frustrated. Drawing comics is hard, and sometimes I even get angry at myself for doing it. But I said I would, and I have ideas I want to express that fit comics best. So I do it.

Doing what’s hard will make you stronger at things that are easy. Do something hard today. You won’t regret it.

When I first started drawing comics, I tried to draw every comic with a full (or almost-full) view of all the characters, full backgrounds, no cut-and-paste characters, and accounting for almost every minute of the characters lives.

I also, strangely, almost ever used the beat panel, or as some apparently call it, the Silent Penultimate Panel (SPP).

It’s been almost two years since I started drawing comics (December 14th being the anniversary) and a lot has changed. I still have to physically stop myself from drawing all of every character. I still draw fairly detailed backgrounds, but even I don’t know where the hell Lila’s desk is or why it’s surrounded by a sea of orange. My anti-cut-and-paste stance made it about 6 comics, and I do skip around a bit more in characters’ lives (because, really, walking around and stuff gets pretty boring).

March 27, 2005, was the first comic I posted where the empty panel didn’t just stand for the passage of time or a different camera view, but the first true “beat panel” I attempted wasn’t until April 29, 2006.

Even now I’m kind of torn on them. They take up a lot of space, comic-wise, and don’t accomplish as much, and I’m not sure I’m good enough a writer to really say that they’re effective when I use them. So I try to avoid them (though lately I’ve abused them a bit).

And maybe that’s a good thing, because today I found The Silent Penultimate Panel Watch, a blog specifically dedicated to display the abuse of beat-panels. Veeeeery eeenteresting. And definitely has me thinking more about my timing.

HANDS!! Maybe someday I can learn to draw hands that have more than three fingers and don’t look like they’ve been mangled by a machine five minutes before!

1) The prints are UPS’ing their way to me even as we speak.
2) Trying to draw people kissing is damn hard.

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The art in panel 1 is definitely more my usual style than the art in panel 4, but I wanted to do something special for Online Comics Day, which is technically tomorrow, but which starts at 7pm (here - midnight GMT) on the official website.

Celebrate Online Comics Day on May 5, 2006 by saying thank you to your favorite comic authors — and by finding new comics to enjoy!

So I’ve been working on the same comic for over a week now, and this is all I’ve got:

Drawing people is HARD. grr. Still at it, but expect Idiocy on the Internet for Tuesday.