tsg
Come next week, I shall be entering full hermit mode for a good month in an effort to finally bring THE SOLAR GRID to a close; only inks, letters, and some colors remain on the final chapter. Without a kitchen though, proper hermit mode can be difficult to pull off; it kind of necessitates a great deal of meal prep. I've got my microwave, kettle, minifridge, and grill outside, so I think I can make it work.
Bout of insomnia gave me enough of a window to pencil through the remaining pages of the final chapter of THE SOLAR GRID the other night. Despite having thumbnailed the entire thing prior, when it came to work on the actual artboards it became evident that a couple extra pages were necessary to allow a particular sequence to breathe. That happens sometimes. Especially vital when closing a story. You don't want things to feel too rushed. Or drag on forever either, it's gotta be just right.
First day in Cairo without human contact since arriving (around 50ish days now). Also first day without contending with house fixups. Just me, my music, and drawing table.
Penciled in half a page of TSG so far today and figured out that I have around 30ish [uninterrupted] days' worth of work to bring TSG to a close once and for all. The “uninterrupted” bit is the tricky part, for days like today are evidently extremely hard to come by, at least until all work on the house is complete.
The epic that is THE SOLAR GRID—the project I've been working on for the better part of the past 9 years—is now 91% complete.
Entering into hyperfocus mode to push through the remaining 9%.
I'm hardly ever on social media, but this reel about Chinese filmmaker Gao Xiaosong's time in an Israeli Kibbutz is too funny.
THE SOLAR GRID #1 is completely sold out. Issues #2-8 are still in stock. I'm sure the time will come when I look upon these single-chapter editions as the strange time capsules that they are.
Started THE PLAGUE by Albert Camus. This being my third Camus, it's now very evident that Camus' writing appeals to me. Adequately sparse, just the right words in exactly the right places in a way that evokes more than what is being said. Something I don't find entirely true of most contemporary authors who lean towards the extra telegrammatic. The buildup of eerie over the first 30 pages in THE PLAGUE is really perfectly paced.
It is hard to believe that this chapter may very well be the last time I draw her for a very long time if not forever.
My plan for the day turned out to be a little too ambitious after all, but TSG pages are coming along smoothly.
Today's background listening included:
Bret Easton Ellis interviews Paul Schrader — Really great. I particularly love the few Pauline Kael anecdotes Schrader shares. Kael is grossly overrated in my opinion, and I say this having enjoyed a number of her books. She did good to bring actual critical criticism to the field, but neither her taste nor how she expressed it really jive with me.
TRACKMARKS by Hamed Sinno — Sinno, who is one of the most talented and creative people I know, was on a train in London when it got held up because a man on the tracks in what was apparently a suicide attempt. Folks on the train started to get irritated, and that irritation soon ballooned into rage, directed squarely at the distressed man who messed up their schedules. Hamed was wise enough to record this vocalized rage and weave it into a powerful song together with lyrics drawn entirely from advertising slogans seen on the London Underground. 👌
I'm doing something a little different with the final chapter of THE SOLAR GRID in that I'm adopting something of an assembly line approach to working it, despite my being the only person actually working on it (This is potentially somewhat ironic given the Luddite segments featured in the previous two).
I've basically divided the chapter into three chunks of 12 pages, tackling one chunk at a time. I've done all the panel layouts for the first chunk, now onto filling them with actual characters and scenes, first in pencils, then in inks.
What this means is that each chunk, or pile rather, gets three passes before moving on to the next: first pass for laying out panels (based entirely on the thumbnails), second pass for doing the actual drawings in pencil, third pass for inking everything up. Dividing the work up this way makes it seem more manageable somehow, less daunting.
I quite like looking at the pages at this stage, with just the empty panels laid out. Pages stripped to the musicality of their compositions.