18th Century Side Project

Before I get into my own post, Matthew wrote a big ol' breakdown of all our expenses and profit from the Kickstarter we did in May last year to fund the first OJST book. http://www.ohjoysextoy.com/kickstarter-numberwang/ 

Ok, so. I've been doing something a bit different for me. 

Lots of artists I know engage in World Building and Character Design before they begin a new comic. They figure out how their characters will look from every angle, tweak their designs, experiment. Likewise with the environments the characters will inhabit. That is the visually responsible thing to do! Get all that shit locked down before you start telling the story, so everybody and everything stays "on model" and doesn't morph over the course of your comic. 

But it's a stage I typically skip. I just don't have the patience. And when you're primarily doing autobio, you're just drawing yourself, your friends, and your own environments, so it's not like you need to invent how these things look from the ground up, y'know? I mean, don't get me wrong, there's still character design that goes into drawing real people. But I'd just figure that out on the page as I was laying out the comic.

 Oh, and also? I don't do fiction. My mind goes blank at the prospect of inventing a story that didn't literally happen to me. And no, trying to take a real life event and then disguise it in fantasy doesn't work for me-- as soon as I get to the stage where I'm supposed to fictionalize elements, my brain goes straight back to that blank white wall. 

Now go back with me to December, when I watched "Georgiana" on Netflix. Oh my god, what a stunning visual feast! Late 18th century costumes and aristocratic house architecture punched me in the brain and I couldn't stop thinking about how much I wanted to draw the opulence of England in the 1790s. 

And then... the tiniest of flimsy stories popped into my head. 

It's simple, incredibly simple, just a vehicle for me to draw pretty women undressing each other from all those many elaborate layers of 18th century fashion so they can lezz out with abandon. Not a whole lot of subtext going on. But still! It's a story! And I made it up. 

Which brings me back to that thing I usually don't do but have been doing for the last month-- character designing and world building. 

I've dived into researching the clothing and hairstyles of that decade, filling a folder full of Versaille ballroom reference photos, drawing and re-drawing my protagonist's face until I get her "right", and thumbnailing the first handful of pages of what looks like it'll be a 20-ish page story. 

It's not something I'm accustomed to, putting so much work into pre-production. It was making me nervous. There's so much research and development to do, when would I have done "enough" to start working on the comic itself? And when do I even have time to work on another comic? When I'm not drawing OJST I'm supposed to engage my mind in other hobbies, so I can "stop working" and let my brain recuperate. This project was shaping up to be something that would never come to fruition. 

"Alright," I thought to myself. "Ok. It's New Year's Eve. For the month of January, every Saturday, I'm going to pencil however many pages I can do on that day. It's just four days of one month. I don't have to finish the story in that time. I'll just make as much progress as I can and then give myself permission to quit in February." 

Today was my first day. 

I roughly penciled the first four pages and got a big ol' headstart inking the elaborate backgrounds on the first page. Hoo boy, I do not have a good head for complexly decorated architecture in perspective :P 

I'm proud of myself, though! It's an actual start! We'll see how much I can get done on the remaining three Saturdays left, but I've got a feeling I might keep at it past January. We'll see. 

And as a reward for reading through this slog of text, here are a few of the research and character design sketches I've done over the last month :) 

Happy New Year!