Multiple passes (Patreon)

Forgive me if I've posted this sequence before - I don't think I have. 

When I was making Bobbins.horse in its final run from 2018-2020,  I got tighter and tighter with the layouts, they became very complex for a little cartoon strip. Towards the end they became brutal. I think, subconsciously, I was keen to get back to drawing full size pages, but didn't have the energy to commit to them on a daily basis. While looking through my archives today I found a page that I drew in multiple formats to try to accommodate a complex top down shot. 

This was the first version. I had made a 3D model for Ryan's bedsitter, which enabled this decadent top down angle in panel 1. Panel 1's luxe design made panel 3 look pretty rough and I couldn't balance it to my satisfaction.

So, foolishly, I redrew the whole comic in a completely different format. This was me going off the deep end, trying to solve the problem of too much complexity by enlarging the page to make complexity more easy to manage as part of a whole. 

Now this is pretty nice. But I couldn't have done that every day at the time. I was feeling very weak. I worked out how to use bits of that big revision in the first version.

So here I've got a brand new panel and I've used the last panel of the big one, except I've had to re-ink it, because the line widths are too different for the big and small comics.

What I should have done, when the first comic didn't work, was turn off my computer, perhaps for two days, perhaps for two weeks, and come back when I didn't feel like I was losing my mind. Because what I have repeatedly failed to learn over the last few years is that when you can't draw something that should be easy, the problem is not that you have suddenly lost your ability to draw, but that you have drawn so much that your poor brain doesn't want to do it any more. 

I wish there was the equivalent of a smoke alarm that would go off in my office when I achieve this state (it is one day since our last workplace accident, dear reader). But at a safe remove of nearly two years, I still like that final comic.