Good stuff.

This was a good week for me. I've finally broken a barrier I think. I'm consistantly starting and finishing pages in under 8 hours now. As far as coloring goes. When I started I spent almost 30 hours on a page (Retarded!!!). I think in time I can get it down to 4-6 hours a page. Even faster if I get enough work to hire/intern a flatter. I used to be able to draw and finish a page in a day on occassion. But never consecutively or consistantly. That's always bothered me and made me doubt that I had what it takes to do this for a living. But I'm finding that it's very different now that I'm getting paid to do it and I actually have a deadline. That fear I always had seems to be my strength now. I dont want to lose this opportunity. I've blown a handful of great opportunities in the past. I had the talent but I wasn't ready for them mentally. God I could write a half-dozen articles about that. But I'm definitely ready now. So this has been a pretty good week. If not for having to go to the doctor monday and tuesday it would have been kick ass. I'm looking forward to doing 4-6 pages next week. I know I can do it now. It's all about learning how to "keep it simple". And learning short cuts and forcing myself to get it done in a certain amount of time. Next I will learn how to consistantly DRAW a finished page in a single day. I'm going to start getting these ideas out of my head. There's just too much good stuff to let it sit any longer. Getting there. Getting there. I had an interesting break from the action today. Someone brought a bunch of kids to the studio to find out about doing comic books. It was a lot of fun for me. I answered lots of questions, did a few sketches, and gave some advice. I think I need stuff like that sometimes to keep it all in perspective. Reminding me where I've been and how far I've come. I have about 30 sketch books on a shelf in the studio and they were going through them, but they kept going to my oldest sketchbooks - stuff that I always think of as really, really, embarrassingly bad (You know what I'm talking about) but they obviously didn't agree. I remember drawing in some of those sketchbooks and I could never have imagined how far I would come in 10 years. So It was pretty fun. I'm going to talk to the school district here and see if they'll let me go speak to some of the schools here about doing art. I think Lubbock needs more people to do stuff like that. There's so very few resources here, it really makes it hard to think outside the box. And if I get one kid drawing comic books I'll be happy. --Will