I generally don’t do the crunch thing. That is: last minute deadline work ’til you drop.
Partly it’s because I’ve always been pretty fast – whether that’s down to my art style or laziness I guess we’ll never know. I have a set tempo I work at and that’s it. My lines come out at that speed.
My speed also doesn’t reflect the quality of the work – that’s an entirely separate metric, I’ve done amazing work fast and terrible work slowly (in fact, more often than not that’s how it goes). I’ve also often poured much more effort in to work that is later described as lazy than work which people are just aghast at the detail (that work I usually do on the phone on autopilot – as long as I have the structural points right the rest is just a kind of intense phone doodle).
Actually, let me address the elephant in the room that you won’t be able to see because, really, it’s my particular elephant.
If you describe an artist as lazy without knowing them or their work ethic and spending the time with them when they did the work – then you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
If you describe an artist as only putting a few hours or minutes in to a page without knowing exactly how much time they spent on the work – then you’re showing yourself as entirely ignorant and again you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
If you call an artist lazy because he’s drawn 45 pages in a month and you’ve not seen those pages so don’t actually know how good or bad he is? You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
(And guess what? those two months where I drew 49 and then 45 pages? some of the best work of my career. The following month, where I drew 6 pages? some of the worst.)
I’ve drawn three amazing pages in one day, and drawn some frightful pages that have taken upwards of 10 days to complete.
Maybe for some it’s a very simple equation of time=effort=quality. But for most artists it’s really not.
God, I wish it was that simple though.
The reality is, when you make your money drawing comics, sometimes your “talent” is the ability to finish a page even though you hate every line you draw.
Sometimes the talent is just keeping your head down and moving on even when every part of you screams “I hate myself, why am I doing this?”
It’s not fun, but that’s the job.
Anyway, my point.
I crunched last night, worked til 3am, on stuff which I quite like actually (TANKS! EXPLOSIONS! WWII!) and now I’m just a hollow husk of a man, no point doing anything. Too tired.
I won’t be crunching again.
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