Writing is so much easier than drawing which is just t-i-m-e c-o-n-s-u-m-i-n-g I guess because you assume in writing that the person just stays in the same place and you don't have to reimagine them every time they say the dumbest little thing. I am not sure I have the concentration span for this - I kind of understand why people take drugs to do art though I am still of the opinion that a lot more people do art to take drugs. Maybe that's just what I've witnessed. Anyway, after about two hours I've done a page (no lettering) and pencilled another. I've also drawn up a third set of frames. I have a minimum goal of ten pages today. If I can't do ten pages in a day then I will not get this thing done by September. Oh, to be fair to myself I also rewrote a couple of pages (as in, wrote the script) linking sections 1 & 2. So I put some thought into the whole as well. This is the section where Napeel and Elyse are walking and talking and are interrupted by catcalls from Bobo and his friend.
I already did an earlier version of this which took me half a day and I just drew it all off the top of my head (the best of it looks better than this tbh but the worst of it much worse) and in that one Bobo's friend was a cat, not a beagle but I decided that since I had introduced cats later in the narrative it might get confusing, someone might think the cat friend was significant or somehow related to the cats who appear later, whereas I had not intended him to be. So I made a beagle friend with the added enjoyment I got from the fact that, when you stand a beagle up on its hind legs, its front legs look like stupid little vestigial arms (actually a real beagle's arms would be longer but I'm minimising for my own entertainment). I like to think that Bobo is wearing a New York Dolls t-shirt and the image is of David Johansen as a duck, but that's just me. I made Napeel much more angry about Bobo's taunts than she was in the original as well to give a certain frisson of protectiveness to Elyse even though on the whole you get the strong sense that she doesn't give a loose root about Elyse (she may still not. Napeel is a complex individual, a fact that is not going to be in any sense revealed in this work).
I keep trying to give Elyse a real face and keep forgetting that she is a freak whose nose is defined only by the bridge of her glasses and her hairline is nonexistent. The best thing about her is her insane teeth which I forgot to draw in before I took the picture of the page at the top but take my word for it. They are off the freakin grid. I have to figure out whether Elyse should have a black mouth aside from the teeth - it will depend which is more horrible. Of course she will grow up though I am not sure whether she is presently an ugly duckling, well she is, but whether she will also be an ugly duck is yet to be decided. I have forty pages to go before that is revealed.
In the interim I am plain old super grateful for my affectionate constant companion who enjoys my proximity and approves of 90% of the things I do.
* Update eight hours later well bizarrely I did manage a few more pages but really, I thought I was setting myself a low target by saying ten pages today and I think I achieved eight, which is really not enough to make this a manageable project... particularly as they're going to get trickier and more labour intensive... why do I agree to things - ever? That said, I could have wasted today in a lot of much less enjoyable ways. Seems to take me basically about an hour per page...
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