This was a project that I got through a mutual friend. Initially the concept seemed simple enough, create a short 20 page introductory comic based off a script. I'd never done anything like this before, so I was initially very excited to take on the job.

I knew working with a client on something as detailed as this was going to be a challenge, and I wanted various points for the client to be able to sign off on the project. I decided I would present an initial "storyboard", some rough sketches showing scenes and speech bubble placement, as well as dialogue text (the initial script lacked a lot of dialogue). After the client signed off on that, there would be the actual sketches on the large bristol board, and after that there would be the inked pages and finally the colored pages. I initially thought this would be a shorter project and would only last one or two months. Unfortunately I didn't really account for client alterations, and this client was more hands on than I thought. We ended up going through many, many time consuming revisions and the project ended up taking considerably longer. One of the pages that suffered the most revisions was the center spread, I had to re-draw it four times!

Another challenge of the project was working with a physical medium. These days, largely due to convenience I work almost exclusively digitally. This presents an issue of the inked pages having unfixable errors on them. After the pages were inked, there was a fair amount of touching up that happened digitally to bring the project to a quality I was satisfied with. Something else that was a bit of a challenge was keeping the text and artwork in the acceptable bounds for print. I accomplished this by setting up some guides in photoshop showing me the safe area (teal) and the cut area (pink) of the page.

The project ended up taking around 2 years in total, for a multitude of reasons, I began to feel fatigued with the project as revisions kept piling on, in addition to this I was taking on excessive hours at work and the client preferred in-person interactions, which were difficult to facilitate, seeing as we lived quite a distance from each other. There were a few times I wanted to quit the project, but I'm glad I stuck it out. There are definitely some things I wish I'd done differently, but I think it was a good learning experience overall.