10,000 Drawings

Gallery: SPQR filler!

I have some minor, necessary, and of course not covered by medical or dental insurance surgery scheduled in a week or so. In case I end up too out-of-sorts for a while to do much drawing, and since I've reached a point where the story is completely spelled out and I know what happens in each installment, I'm working on creating a backlog of comics so the story will keep moving along even if I'm inert. This time I might even be able to resist posting the new comics allatonce.

I was also thinking of trying to distract everyone from the current lack-of-new-comic by amusing you with the very first sketches I did for chapter 1, plus a few other character-development doodles.

But my sketchbooks aren't as nice and polished as other people's sketchbooks, where artists usually have lovely portraits of all their characters from various angles, and in different costumes, and other interesting things suitable for framing, as they develop each character's look. My sketchbooks tend to be itty bitty layouts of the comic, with panels ranging from an inch high down to, oh, a centimeter or smaller. And scribbles. And quickly jotted dialogue.

Each strip goes through many scribbled iterations in the sketchbook, as I tend to doodle the same thing over and over while the dialogue and the art solidify in my mind. Like a director watching actors rehearse, I watch my characters on their itty bitty stage and give them little nudges of new direction, and think of how their performance here fits into the overall story arcs.

The big image is Itty Bitty Sketchbook #1 page 1. (It has seen better days.)

So. I might scan some filler art so there's something new to see each day for the next few weeks, even though it'll just be weird rough doodles. Avert your eyes!

Hmm, maybe I should have spent more time developing each character's look and working on drapery and chiaroscuro effects and whatnot, and less time doodling....