Think of this news post as a kind of diary entry that serves to document my progress and help me motivate myself by clearly laying out what I've done and what I still need to do.

So! The Sweet Sixteen Comic Contest kicked off last month. Now, I love comics and I've been drawing them for as long as I can remember, but in spite of this I was reluctant to throw my hat in the ring. It's not easy telling a self-contained story in only 16 pages, much less so when there's a deadline looming over your head. But in the end, I decided to take up the challenge and give it my best try. If nothing else, I'll have the sense of accomplishment that comes with finishing something within a limited timeframe. That's not a bad thing at all if you ask me.

Having made the decision to create an entry, the first thing I needed to do was come up with an idea. Fortunately for me, I had the benefit of a huge pile of rough story ideas that I had lying around in my mental file cabinet - I figured it would be best to use one of them as a basis for the comic, instead of coming up with something totally new. My first idea used characters from a novel I was writing a few years ago, and while I liked the story I could feel that my heart wasn't in it. I moved on to a different idea set in the universe of another novel I worked on at some point, and while this story was firmly in my comfort zone it was also very similar to a lot of other things I've done in the past (including this comic I posted here on Newgrounds). I felt like it would have pigeonholed me, so I gave up on it after four pages of rough drafts. Next, I considered whittling down a longer comic from earlier this year into a more compact story that would remove all the fat and get to the point quickly. I took my written script for said comic and extracted the part I wanted to use, then re-wrote it to make sense as a stand-alone story. This idea got the green light, and by the end of September I had finished the rough draft of all 16 pages.

With everything ready, I started work on the actual comic on October 1st. Instead of doing a full page (pencils + inking + fills/shading) and then moving on to the next one, I decided to divide my workload into four stages:

1) pencil all the pages

2) ink all the pages

3) shade/fill all the pages

4) scanning, lettering, finishing touches

At the moment I'm still in phase one. With my current schedule, I can only work on the comic five days a week, and only in the evening if it's a working day. Doing the pencil sketches is the most demanding and time-consuming part of the job, so I've settled on doing one page per day, which translates to five pages a week. As I'm writing this, seven pages have been fully penciled. I'm very pleased to say that I'm sticking to my one-page-per-day schedule so far; if I keep it up, I'll have all the pages sketched by the end of next week. The remaining parts of the process are less complicated, so I'm pretty confident I'll be able to finish everything on time.

And that's about it. I'll do another one of these in about a month, when I will hopefully be deep into the inking process!