Realizing your mistakes...

...and taking steps to fix them!

Alright, let's ditch the self-help seminar vibe and dive straight into the glorious chaos of my comic-making journey.

Hi! How's everyone doing? I'm here, back with more tales from the trenches, and let me tell you, it's been...educational.

First things first, a public service announcement:

I AM A NOOB! A NOOBY NOOBSTER NOOB!

Yep, a middle-aged noob, flailing wildly in the deep end of comic arts. I'm practically a legend in other realms of course (clears throat), but this? This is humbling.

Okay, so I've finally cracked the code to something so blindingly obvious, it's embarrassing. Thumbnails are supposed to be...wait for it...SMALL! Apparently, doing 20+ pages of "thumbnails" at full-page size wasn't the masterstroke I thought it was.

See, my intention is to one day be able to print my comic in something akin to A4 / European album style. So naturally, bigger thumbnails meant better visualization, right? Wrong! What it actually meant was me getting lost in the weeds, obsessing over panel details when I should've been focusing on the big picture. But hey, I'm a hands-on learner. I needed to crash and burn to truly understand. I thought a page a day, on a good week, was a win! Oh, naive me.

Then, BAM! A comic artist's video drops the mic. Suddenly, the thing I knew but was stubbornly ignoring smacked me in the face like a rogue pie. And let me tell you, the productivity surge was real. Suddenly, I was cranking out 2-3 pages a day! It was such a relief!

So I got an old small sketchbook gathering dust (sacrilege!) and in a matter of a few days managed to do 12 pages, cutting my time in (not good at math) …a lot!

I am now currently working on page 33 of "The Keepers of Wadin", inching closer to that sweet 48-page first chapter goal. Or maybe I’ll take a buddy’s advice and plough through to the end, we’ll see.

Stay tuned and find out!

Till next time, take care and stay safe!

Leo.