Trying SO hard

It is called Aluminum City.

I will finish this damn thing before the quarter is over. Then maybe I can sleep again. Remember sleep? I don't. My eyes are bloodshot and my right thumb constantly twitches because it's not used to drawing so much (or really at all). My robots will be the death of me. My Shakespeare paper is mad at me coz I spend all my time with my comic instead of with it.

And I'm only slightly over halfway done.

But the pages are going quicker now. I've gotten the hang of Photoshop, which I had never used before, and I'm slowly but surely churning out the pages. This whole thing has been a very interesting lesson in visual art. I had to figure out spacing and paneling and timing. You never think about how difficult it is to place speech bubbles until you actually go to do it. The development of my comic skillz is very very apparent as you read through it. The first few pages are fairly atrocious-looking, but they improve as they go.

It's also been a lesson in frustration. I went over the memory limit allotted to Stanford students very quickly and had to get a thumb drive thing. I have to battle other folks in my dorm to use the one computer in the cluster with a scanner. Photoshop's new thing is popping up repeated windows that tell me there's a program error, which keep me from doing anything for a few minutes at a time. Photoshop can be a little bitch.

I wanted to do a comic this long because I didn't feel I would be able to tell a full story without this length. I wrote the story I wanted to write and that was the length that story turned out to be. But it was interesting how I had to tweak bits as I went in order to fit them into panels because of size/spacing. I had to let the perfectionism go and settle for mediocrity. And now that the end of the quarter is approaching, I'm thinking of condensing some pages, just to make it manageable. The good news is that many of the pages that are left will be quicker ones. Some pages only take like 45 minutes, as opposed to 3 hours. It's depressing to think that the 3 hours of effort I put into certain pages will be finished by the reader in less than a minute. I definitely have newfound respect for comic artists, and I will definitely be spending longer on each page from now on, absorbing all the details, because I know now just how much effort went into each one of those details. But I mostly have 45-minute ones left.

Oh God I am so tired.