I went down a bit of a rabbit-hole lately, going through my stacks and stacks of old comic art and stories going back to my earliest months in High School. I was looking for stories and art to include in pdf anthologies I was putting together as bonus rewards for the Wahoo Morris Kickstarter.

One thing that struck me during the process was how prolific and full of ideas I was at a younger age. I would start multiple stories at the same time, finishing some, abandoning others.

The better I got, and the more ambitious I got, the greater the tendency to abandon a project and start over from scratch or move on.

Honestly, that didn’t change much as I turned pro, except that I’ve never had problems finishing if there is an outside influence, like a deadline or paycheck!

And I no longer start the same idea over from scratch again and again.

But my archives are full of half-done or briefly sketched out ideas for short stories and pin-ups I never quite got around to finishing.

Though, lately, I seem to have reversed my inclinations.

I’ve been stalled out on starting something new for ages. And the ideas just are not flowing.

But, after a slow startup, I seem to find it easy to finish off old loose ends.

I’ve been sick this week, and unable to concentrate through the fog and fever, I’ve tried to keep productive with some busy work.

I started by fleshing out my sketch for the back-cover portion of an intended wraparound cover to Sîan #1 and then picking away at the inks until it was completed. This one has been on the to-do list for awhile as one of my next to-be-published projects is a full-colour single issue of Sîan. Drawing a billion coins on the floor of a treasure vault was a little challenging while dizzy with a fever!

I then pulled out a sketch I had started as a potential cover to a planned pin-up/art book before changing my mind and abandoning it. I originally started drawing it last fall, so it’s not that old of a project, but it was based on a doodle I made on the back of a Katie & Orbie location design from around 15 years ago! I finished penciling it, then inked it, and will probably end up using it as the back cover to that proposed book.

Then, wanting to keep busy, I pulled out this abandoned pin-up I started over 10 years ago for an Edgar Rice Burroughs Fanzine a colleague was involved in at the time. It was of a scene from the novel the Cave Girl, and I was trying to do my best J. Allen St. John impersonation!

Deadlines got in the way and it sat unfinished until now.

I imported it into Clip Studio yesterday and inked it from scratch just for the hell of it. It really has no purpose, but it can replace the pencil and partially inked version that was going to go in the Art Book.

And to keep the momentum going, today, I pulled out 3 other old pin-up sketches and started fleshing them out as well as pulling out a 3 page story I started in 1997 that was supposed to be my first submission to Mythography but was abandoned when I couldn’t shoe-horn the plot into the allotted 3 pages. If I can flesh it out to 4 pages, then the planned anthology book of my Mythography and Forbidden Book stories will be a few pages longer.

And maybe, just maybe, getting a bunch of finished art done in a short period of time just might start to knock loose some of those mental blocks that are still getting in the way of the new ideas starting to flow again!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2018 at 7:01 am and is filed under Art, Comics, Process & Techniques, Sketchbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.