“Gneech Comics Drawing Month,” a.k.a. GneCoDraMo, continues apace… specifically, at a frustratingly slow pace. ¬.¬ I have 11 pages scripted and given rough layouts, five pages completely inked, and as of last night at midnight, two pages colored. And that’s with many, many late nights devoted to it.

Guh. No wonder neither Arclight nor Coventry took off. If it’s taking me this long when I’m devoting 50+ hours/week to it, what could I have possibly done on a couple of hours at night during the week? O.o

It’s not all bad news, however. For starters, I’m very pleased with the quality of the work. Suburban Jungle, or at least this new incarnation of it, finally looks like what I always wanted it to. It’s still not perfect, of course, and likely never will be. But with the full size canvas, but more importantly the tools in Manga Studio and the joy of digital inking– plus 15 years of practice– have finally put my art about where I wanted it to be when I started.

So the trick now, is to retain the quality, but ramp up the speed. Of course, the work is kinda front-loaded, as I have to do dev sketches, create palettes, and do architectural studies for all the characters and locations as they appear the first time. As I build up a library of poses and standard “shots” to pull from, it will go faster. Things will also speed up as I get a better handle on the comic format– I keep pulling out various volumes of Love Hina to figure out how Akamatsu-sempai handled all those talky, talky scenes without becoming an endless series of talking heads.

I think I’m getting there. :) And speaking of, I better get to work!

-The Gneech

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