Shane here again with another installment. As you may or may not remember from last time I talked a little about phases of a project. In my estimation there are three.The START, the MIDDLE and the FINISH.
For years I considered myself good at the Start. I'm an "idea" guy, someone who had concepts and takes on story and character development. This extended beyond comics into other aspects of my life. I was good out of the gates but when it came to the Middle, the newness wore off and it became WORK!
I'm not afraid of work, but it really made me consider the Start a lot more. An idea is nothing without execution, and even with execution the end product just might not be that sexy. But I'd never know until I completed something. So suffice to say I wasn't much of a Finisher either.
An analogy that comes to mind is fitness.
The thing about it is, you won't get anywhere with exercise without some sort of conditioning. You have to build upon a routine that makes perserverance and practice it's core. Say you want to lift weights...you go in the gym and you start bench pressing and before you know it you've torn a shoulder muscle. This happens often. Then you learn about warming up...preparing the muscles to achieve the output you ask of them. So fine you warm up the muscles and you have a good Start on weight training. But what's this...you're tired and beat after 3 sets. Stamina is what gets you through a workout. Building stamina will help make the work out experience last longer and you'll gain more in strength and endurance.
So to put it in terms of doing any type of work, I find that preparation for a project is essential. Mapping out the big picture will help give me a vision of where that end goal is and how to pace myself. While I'm doing pre-production on a project (in the form of concept art and marketing graphics) I figure out how much art is required to do the project. From years of experience and "conditioning" I know what I'm capable of handling now. Finishing projects has helped me understand this better. And the only way I was able to finish a project is by scheduling my time.
How do I schedule my time you may be asking?
I figure out how much time it takes to do each task by breaking down the very basic elements of a comic project. Thumbnails and roughs, I can do anywhere between 30 thumbnails and 5-10 roughs a day. Pencils, I can do between 2-4 a day. Inks 3-4 a day. Colors...well colors are a little more tricky...I'm still trying to harness that one. I like color so much that it's hard to be satisfied with the first pass. So basically 1-2 a day is safe. I got this information by tracking my time based on a work week where I had a steady amount of freelance. Because let's face it, you still gotta make money.
With this info, I usually will put this into Microsoft Project. Here I can track and check off each item as I finish it. The beauty is it serves as a guide and a goal marker. With each page done, I have a visual of how close I am to the finish line. It's really the only way for me to stay focused. That and it helps to be working on only the "BEST" ideas you can afford to. The process of comics is so time consumming that I don't want to look back on my life and see a slew of books that looked like everyone elses.
You only get one shot at this so make it count for something.
Next time, I'll go more in depth about THE PROCESS and hopefully share some examples of how I work. Stay tuned.
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