The last post was something of a ‘how did I come to start this project / how did I gather the motivation to continue with the project’ emotional how-to, whereas this one will look more at my haphazard project organisation.
I’m not 100% sure the sequence of things, but here are some of the thigs I made to plan and keep track of my first multi-page comic.
I made a little maquette book with torn out pages from a note book. Having the simple clip binding made it easy to mix up the pages and swap things around, or insert pages where a section needed to be expanded. This was a nice little artefact to show to other people as well, and something I could keep within eyeshot on the desk to remind me that I had an ongoing project!
I also drew out this plan (below) in a nice A5 ish notebook, found it was too small and too tucked away, so I photocopied it at work, blowing the spread up to A3 so I had some pages to blu-tack onto my bedroom wall and check the boxes as I went along. I think it is generally good advice to keep your work out of the room you sleep in, but sometimes you don’t have much choice! [I’m very glad to say these days I do have a separate work station 🙂 ]
So from all this, I have taken on board lots of advice I’ve heard over the years about giving yourself opportunities to track your progress, like marking off things on a checklist, and I find that it works very well for me.
Something else I have struggled massively with in my life: managing time and meeting deadlines / moving forward with a project when there is no real deadline… So, to give myself something to work towards, around Sept 2024 (I think) I took it upon myself to try to submit this piece of work to the First Graphic Novel Award 2025. The deadline was 22nd March, I was going on holiday with some family to Bulgaria and then NI from the 9th-20th, so I decided I was also going to submit early. For me, this was completely unheard of, and tbh it sounded pretty laughable. But I managed it – and that worked out quite well!!!
To challenge myself further, I decided that I would also simultaneously self-publish this WIP and print it too. While this was going on, I started a new full time job in Jan 2024, leaving Footprint (where I’d worked for seven years), but I couldn’t really afford to pay like a normal guy to print my zine in my former workplace. Very luckily, my lovely former colleagues allowed me to come in and print it myself over the weekend, allowing me to pay for just the material costs rather than labour as well. This was a very privileged position to be in, and it made a lot of difference to me in terms of confidence to be able to see my work in a finished state like this!
In summary, I was able to move forward with the project by:
- creating a mini version / maquette (maquette is a term I learned at art school and though I don’t want to be pretentious about it, I like using this term even though it’s generally applied to sculpture).
- creating a kind of ‘map’, with tick boxes for stages of completion: Sketch, Draw, Scan.
- working towards someone else’s timeline! This helped take some of the decision-making out of my hands as well as giving me a boundary to work within.
- filing finished work in a tidy way. I’ll chat more about this in the next post.