I’m continuing my marathon with a series of illustrations for an online + print project based on my pulpish, imaginary magazine Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.
This has quite a bit in common with a sprawling retro future comics project I was struggling with for a long time, and this one, though it’s much smaller in scale, shares many of the same difficulties that broke my ship on the rocks of that other project. Chief among those is the sheer volume of objects and illustrations that I need to produce.
Once I’d done ten of these, I was surprised to see that in spite of the long time I’d spent on some new environments and other objects I was still averaging about a day and a quarter per illustration. It didn’t feel that fast, believe me. And to you, that might not even sound fast. For me, though, that’s blazingly quick.
But I feel an unusual amount of pressure to produce the images quickly, and I don’t think that the results are as even as I’d like. There’s at least one illustration I mean to go back to and rework completely.
So I’m still wresting with fit and finish issues. Still, working on sequences like this one has let me experiment with all sorts of things, as we see here – where the story has gone from the broad to the narrow, and I’m starting to use wide angle "lenses" to reinforce the idea that the action here is largely internal in a character who’s become isolated. Neat stuff.
Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com
