Month: January 2024

Update from the desk of Recovery

Posted on January 31, 2024 by deepwatercomic

Its wild coming back to page creation after nearly three and a half months of “inability to draw a stick figure” you’d think that having surgery on/in your torso wouldn’t really affect your drawing skills.

LOL

But of course it does, because the meds hate you and make you feel dumb. Its also difficult to sit up straight for long periods of time. Plus my brain turned into scrambled eggs, I couldn’t focus on anything that wasn’t directly in front of me. But even when I’d sit at my desk or lounge on the couch and stare at a blank piece of paper, pencil in hand, any thought in my head was replaced by a continuous Farting noise. Something like this-
PPPPPBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBFFFFFHHHHHHHHPPPPPPPTTTTTTTT
Except its like, forever.

I wished more than once that I was like those ladies who get out of excision/ hysterectomy surgery and almost instantly feel better. But I wasn’t one of them. My recovery has been abysmally slow. Only recently have I started “feeling” like myself again (and “feeling like myself” is a loaded term. Do I feel like I’m dying each month? . . . No? But would I like to eat without heartburn or feeling like I’ve eaten sixteen tons of cement mix? . . . maybe? I’m at the thirteen (fourteen?) week mark here. One day I think I’ll make a more personal post about the surgery (not that . . . A lot of this wasn’t personal). Right now I’m still processing.


Currently I’m in a pencil/inking stage of pages and struggling with finishing one a day. The muscles in my right wrist and palm are still pretty tight and get fatigued quickly. I’m trying to do stretches and loose figure drawing beforehand to warm up (which I should have been doing all along). Its one major reason why I think my next project will be inked and colored via procreate. I gotta save these sweet, sweet moneymakers!
My hands guys. My hands.

All this to say I’ve redrawn and inked pages 190 &191, I’m a third of the way done with pg 192- Its slow progress- but its moving forward. Next week will be a coloring week, so I think I’ll show what my process is in creating a page. That way I could add pictures!

Update from the desk of revisions

Posted on January 25, 2024 by deepwatercomic

I had a Speech teacher recently mention that I need to have more venerability to connect to a an audience. I don’t know how much I actually believe that, social media really demands that we lay everything bare and claims our attention at all times; and that’s really not me. I like being able to come up for air, you know, touch grass and what not.
So I tried to come up with a compromise. I thought that I would start a little blog of sorts to let people know more about the “making” part of the comic. And also have updates in one place that don’t require you to jump from social media platform to social media platform (But please, feel free to follow me on instagram- that algorithm is evil to artists. ). Also I really want to make this webpage/website work for me rather than me just logging on every once in a while to mutter angrily “what the fuck is this? What the fuck is that? How the shit does that work?” and then crossing my fingers that people can actually use the toggles and navigate the website.
Plus it helps me keep to a deadline! A deadline which has been pretty nebulous so far- I come and go when there are pages to post. Before we moved (the most recent one) I actually had a buffer scheduled to release a bunch of finished pages by-weekly. I’d done it! I’d finally become the adult comic maker that I always wanted to be! Oh Joyous day!
That was until I found some old notes, read them, and ironically it felt like the revisions I had done over time actually took away from the story. The only way I can describe it is that suddenly creating dialog and sketching and inking pages felt like a fatiguing, painfully long slog through waist deep mud. Kind of like Artax slowly sinking into the bog of despair.
It wasn’t writers block, it was worse- a sudden realization that I hated, hated the next planed part of the comic. It felt banal and contrived. The jokes weren’t funny, Merman’s decision to become human wasn’t clear, the time-line didn’t make sense and it abandoned the whole overarching theme of different types of love and how they bond us together.
Now, again, I really want to stress that we moved- and I realized this maybe two weeks before we were literally loading boxes into a 22 ft truck. Not to mention I had major surgery three months ago. Of which I’ve only recently been recovering from. I was hoping the fog of multiple pain meds and the shock of my body getting used to having three less organs was the reason I hated it. That I just wasn’t ready to return to work.
Then I looked at the notes again while unpacking, and yeah, no, I definitely need to rehash the whole middle of the story-which involved a Karaoke scene, some hanging around, a distinct lack of wine and cheez-its and little to no rising action. I am assuming that means that if I hate it. Then the reader will probably hate it too.
The good news is I have time to fix this and I have a plan. My next quarter doesn’t start until April. But don’t be surprised when some pages go missing and then pop back up with alternate text.