Days For Days (Patreon)

For the last couple of weeks I've been writing and roughing out material that will follow the current Steeple story onto the web. It's a one-off thing, 32 pages, that will run on badmachinery.com on February. Having not drawn "in anger" since mid-October, I've been excited to get back to making comics. So I've been warming up for the return to action with some Giant Days drawings.

I've written a few times here in recent months about being dissatisfied with my drawing - not so much that it was bad, more that I had lost a certain feeling a few years ago and have struggled to get it back. I dug out the artwork for the second and third self-published Giant Days comics today and tried to work out why, for all the technical strides I've made in many areas, they somehow feel more like the comics I want to make. 

I think half the issue is simply that, coming off the early Bad Machinery stories, I'd been drawing kids a lot and my characters are slightly cuter and cartoonier as a result. I love the proportions. But to reintroduce them requires unlearning a lot of muscle memory.

I could work at this for thirty more years and I know I'll never quite master drawing the way I want to. I have no idea what I'm aiming for, I don't realise when I get there, and after I do, I get on a train to somewhere else without knowing the destination.  Every time I learn something new, it seems to push something useful out.  Thank goodness I enjoy just pushing a pen around.