20 February 2021

Today was a great day of putting in some work for Deep Blue. 

Got home this evening at 7pm, after doing a car park gig at Majestic for about two hours. It humbles me and reminds me that I can go back to doing 'undignified work' if need be, and if maybe, one day I need to, then I would. I must never be above doing anything at all. Work is a glorious gift. 

So I've been struggling with this scene of Bri helping Calix escape from the Health Services in the city. I tried to write the scenes in script format but I remembered the trick that Mad Max employed in writing the entire movie – because it is such an action packed story, fully visual storytelling experience, they used story boarding instead of written script. I did the same for this action scene. Instead of words explaining the action, I drew them without words. The finished pages will end up having dialogues and words to go with them, but I really am enjoying these sketched up pages, just as they are. They have the rawness and energy to them. 

In a manner reminiscent of Steven Pressfield's language, I pushed through the "resistance" and created some scenes that I am genuinely quite proud of. 

 

They are still in the sketch process. After this I will go in with black line pen and ink it, before I shade them, and format it for lettering. Just one of the 4 steps for every single page.. But the sketch and plotting of the page in this step is the most mentally draining work. After this, it is the fun part of drawing and polishing it up. I really love these pages as they celebrate the comic medium and they are not done in a way that mimics movie shots. They are so specifically comic scenes. 

When I am in the flow of long working slots like, I love it. I live for it. Like today, I worked on these pages and many more – from about 8pm to 1am. That's about 5 hours of work.

And all of that to say, it was not easy to sit down to work on this. I was quite stuck and wondered if I was better off spending the evening watching Netflix. But I forced myself to sit down and push through, even if I have to create mediocre work – atleast I was going to move forward a little bit today.

And there you have it, always some of my best work come out of pushing myself out of laziness. 

Speaking of Steven Pressfield, I also bought his audiobooks on my iBooks.