Wednesday, April 28, 2010

First Milestone reached!

Today I have officially reached the first milestone of the first chapter final artwork creation process. I have created (slightly over) 20% of the final art, measured by lenght. After reaching the end of a section I created this milestone plan to review my progress and to estimate the time I'll need to finish the whole thing.

I spent 24 hours on the artwork that now is implemented into the layout. However, I also spent close to 13 hours on artwork that I discarted completely. Like I've already written in an older post, I had some problems to find the visual style that I was looking for. I guess that I have overcome these problems now and that I can calculate with the 24 hours for the rest of the artwork. That would mean another 100 hours of work in front of me. Given the fact that in the first 4 months of this year I have managed to work 187 hours on my private projects, which makes 46 hours a month, I can estimate to finish the first chapter somewhere in July. I'm concentrating on the graphic novel but still have some other stuff to do so that will be end of July, perhaps August. That would be cool. After finishing the first chapter I'll also have to build the Wormworld Saga homepage, which should take a month or so, and then the adventure can begin. Well, we'll see how accurate this estimation is. Life can't be calculated and who knows all the pitfalls along the path?

Thinking in these timeframes is challenging sometimes. I often think about how fast I could be if only I could work fulltime on the project. Right at the moment I spend 10 hours a day at the job to be able to work 2 hours a day on the project. If I could spend 8 hours a day on the graphic novel I could finish the chapter in 15 days. That's three weeks with free (!) weekends. But thoughts like these lead to nowhere so I just keep on working. The milestone chart is a great motivation. I'm actually getting somewhere and I'm really looking forward to share my first chapter with all of you as soon as it is ready.

In the meantime I have some character artwork for you. Here you see Jonas' teacher Mrs. Rubens:


And of course I had to figure out how Jonas looks in everyday life when he's not wearing his adventure outfit. I had the idea to give him a Captain Orion T-Shirt. I figured out that this might be a movie in Jonas' world that boys like him would be a fan of. :)

Ok, back to work!

12 comments:

  1. Viel Erfolg beim weiteren Vorgehen :-)

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  2. I'm looking forward to the first chapter! Good luck with finishing it and with the rest off the project!

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  3. Very excited to see this, everything looks amazing so far.

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  4. What brush do you use to get that type of texture?

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  5. Im so excited to see the first chapter! I hope you get lots of extra time to explore Wormworld! I love what you have shown us so far! Thanks for the sneak peaks!

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  6. Looking forward! :)

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  7. I remember seeing your "Trapped!" illustration some time ago, and I'm delighted to learn that there's a story behind it. I look forward to seeing more.

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  8. Thanks for all your nice comments! I'm also looking forward to see the first chapter published and can't wait to share it with you all.

    @ Anonymous:

    I'm using a quite simple set of brushes for the graphic novel. I'm blocking in the big shapes with a "bristly" brush and painting the details with a small, diamond shaped brush. However, I recently installed the Photoshop CS5 trial version and I think I will make good use of the natural media bristle brushes in the future.

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  9. Hi Daniel,
    freue mich über jeden Post den du veröffentlichst. Sehr spannend das Ganze!

    Ich weiss nicht wie interessant das für dich ist, aber wollte es mal erwähnt haben:
    http://www.mycomics.de/sondermann

    Dieses Jahr wirds wahrscheinlich nichts, aber so für die Zukunft kanns nicht schaden, denk ich. ( Falls du überhaupt die Bedingungen erfüllst, hab mich da nicht genau informiert)

    Weiter so!

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  10. @ yakonusuke:

    Hey, danke für den Tipp!

    Ich könnte mit meinem Scrollformat Probleme bei myComics.de bekommen, weil ich keine Seitenunterteilung habe. Vielleicht ist deren System aber auch flexibel genug für mein Scrollformat. Werde ich mir anschauen, sobald mein erstes Kapitel reif für die Veröffentlichung ist. Dieses Jahr klappt es mit der Deadline für den Sondermann auf keinen Fall aber im nächsten Jahr könnte ich dann schon zwei oder drei Kapitel online haben. Da werde ich das dann auf jeden Fall versuchen.

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  11. As the author of "In die kloue van die draak", I have some idea what it's like doing what you're doing. It took me 1 year to do the pictures of my book (73 pages, with 9 panels per page), and 5 years to color them. The most important thing is not to be discouraged by the enormousness of the final goal, but to focus on the now, and the little achievements along the way.

    However, you're taking it to a whole new level. I always say drawing is 10% talent, and 90% patience. The detail in your work is just unbelievable. Given the amount of time I've put in my book, I cannot even begin to comprehend the amount time and patience goes into your drawings. It's truly amazing!

    I'm sorry to hear that you're no longer going to include your "trapped" picture in your story. It's really a picture that begs the question as to what's going to happen next.

    Still, I look forward to see how it all plays out. Thank you for sharing your imagination with the world.

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