New Story Update: The Cast Is Assembled
Character Design Done! And Some Thoughts On Creative Practice
Time for another peek at what’s going on behind the scenes with my next story.
I’ve got the character designs done! Scroll down to see the illustrations. Which means I’m ready to move on to sketching out thumbnails of the pages.
And by “done”, I mean I’m satisfied enough with my current quality of work that it’s time to keep moving. Also helpful is how Molly Ostertag says it’s totally ok, or actually that it’s good, for your art style to evolve even during one story. It’s not animation, so it doesn’t need that same kind of consistency, and has a lot fewer people and a lot less money involved.
I’ve heard comics and prose authors say that you just need to actually finish projects and keep creating, or you’ll never actually finish anything and improve. This very much aligns with how I’ve approached my cartoons and graphic storytelling (with all of one book under my belt, but): each strip, each story, is another step along the way of a longer journey of being an artist and writer.
Each project is not the only nor the last project I will create. This means that it doesn’t need to be perfect because it doesn’t need to carry the weight of representing my entire person alone.1 I learn and improve through the doing and carry the lessons I learn into my next project.
Now, I didn’t always have this mindset. I was a perfectionist with my art when I was younger, and it was somewhat crippling. I was “too precious” with it. But over the years, through a combination of pushing myself to work in different approaches and accept imperfection and just getting better at my craft, which makes it easier to create work that comes closer to your ideals, I’ve managed to evolve my mindset.
Coming Up On Zeno’s Arrow
Once I’ve got the thumbnails done, I’ll create a title image and announce the new story’s name and description. Similar to how I did for Phased. But with the actual serialization, I’m thinking of doing things a little differently. Substackers have noted the challenge with serializing fiction on Substack: a new reader coming across the story midstream isn’t going to know what’s going on and may be less likely to go back and catch up and then follow along. So instead of posting new pages as the posts that get broadcast, I’m thinking of having a separate post each time I put up new pages announcing that there are new pages up, and linking people to the landing page where all the posts with pages are… This way each post points you to the start as well as the new pages? Then again, with Phased, for each new page post, I linked to the landing page where all the prior posts that had the pages, and it seems like it’d be helpful to have actual pages in the broadcasted posts so there is content to get people interested? 🤷♂️Any thoughts/ideas on what’s worked well for you? Please let me know! You can hit reply on this email, leave a comment, or message me in the app.
But more immediately: my sabbatical, which launched this whole graphic storytelling project, is coming to an end in just a couple weeks. I’ve got a lot of reflections to share on this experience, and will be writing them up. Stay tuned!
Till next,
William
Super tangent: this is like how with minority representation in culture and media, the more representation there is, the less burden there is on any individual character to stand in for the entirety of a demographic group.