I woke up this morning with an envelope next to my head. Turned out to be a statement from Circadian Corp. -- payment due immediately for staying up until 1:30 two nights ago. The fine print pointed out that I'm not in college any more.

Last night I drove down to the author's house and dropped off two CDs with all of the chapter art. I'm ambivalent about them. Many of the drawings are better than I've previously done, but I see how they could be much better if I even had another hour to spend on each one.

Good Things About This Project

• First time being paid to draw.


• Learned more Photoshop-fu, including how to use channels to save selections.


• Got a lot of practice painting with greyscale and focusing on values (brightness/darkness). Think I got a good sense of volume on several pieces.


• Had a clear project to focus on and (loose) deadlines.


• I understand better how thumbnails (preparatory sketches), studies, and finding reference is part of doing an illustration.

Difficult Things About This Project

• 22 drawings plus a cover is quite a lot to churn out. More than I thought.


• Backgrounds and details really bring a picture alive and give it essential character. I didn't have time to give these drawings the attention they deserve, and a number of the pictures suffer for that.


• Time to work on these was a problem. On a good night I'd have about an hour to work, but on many nights there was no time at all. C'est la vie, but it makes it difficult to estimate how long it will take to finish a project.


• The art direction was virtually non-existent. Getting answers to questions about preferred style and even technical questions like dimensions for the cover was hard. Now, the author is self publishing and has no experience doing art direction so I'm not surprised or even annoyed at him or anything. It did delay things and result in a few false starts, though.

For future projects I'll specifically take on less. Rather than do a bunch of drawings that are OK to decent, I'd rather spend more time and produce less. Here are a few projects I'm considering:

• Short comic based on one of a friend's micro-fiction pieces.


• Short comic I wrote and thumbnailed about dysthymia.


• Refining the recent figure drawing I did of the segmented android woman.


• Picking a couple of the drawings from this project and spending that time on them to make them portfolio worthy.


• Portraits of various family/friends that I've gotten sidetracked from.


• Spending time doing studies of environments, landscapes, room interiors, etc.