Photo assembly along with 4.1 and 4.3 this weekend, line art and cleanup yesterday, shading this afternoon. Today’s to-do list consist{s|ed} of getting a start on a thick stack of work-work and finishing this. I figured given the mental issues I had on Tuesday, getting the page done and then spending the rest of the day hurtling towards a work-work milestone was the way to go.
It’s not so much a question of work ethic or priorities as it is a question of mental health – yesterday was fucking torture, an interminable purgatory of three different tasks insisting on taking the high-priority focus slot. I was able to make some progress on each task, at great cost and another near-breakdown (the mental equivalent of an application locking up and requiring a process-kill and manual restart). While this is a fairly regular and occasionally debilitating life occurrence, it’s gotten easier to spot and deal with in a timely fashion now that I’m sober. My brain reacts in a very specific, well-defined and completely counter-productive way to certain kinds of stress. After roughly fifteen years of viewing this as off-the-rails Weird Behavior, over the course of the last year or so I’ve been able to figure out the basics of what the deal is and can, with some regularity, predict the sorts of situations that’ll trigger a “shut down” reaction and to some extent plan accordingly.
Not always, mind you – but I’ve managed to cut these periods of effective non-functionality from several days or weeks down to a day or less, and I’ve managed to keep myself out of Western Psych in the process.
So, today I’m more lucid than Overwhelmed, the brain is ticking along instead of buckling under a buffer overflow, and despite the next page being a relative slam-dunk it’ll probably be Friday or Sunday before I actually have the time to put into it – I need to model some asset mockups, but before I can do that in good conscience I have a positively massive amount of unrelated nerd things to tackle.
Also not so much a question of mental health as asset availability – the file I needed in order to start nerding just hit the DropBox a few minutes ago, indirectly validating my order of operations for the day.
As to the page…
Due to construction, I wound up shooting the side of Mellon Square opposite the one I’d imagined. The script layout has a fair mockup of the original shot that I wanted for panel five – the fallback is just as effective, and actually works better for line of action. Bill’s dialogue in panel three got a slight tweak. No changes otherwise. Had page one been the initial two panel layout, panel two would have been a near mirror of panel one of this page, with Jason either sitting down or Jason and Bill drawing their envelopes. An early layout of this page was four horizontal panels, using the same background for each shot. That would have been boring as hell. While the shots I grabbed for panels one through four fell short of being totally optimal, I think the results are pretty solid.
The final comp was pretty light in the photoshop department – this part of town isn’t as visually cluttered as others, which left the only substantial bit of shoopin’ the area around the garbage can in panel five. I pixel-paved over a cigarette butt bucket – a piggyback garbage can as removed from the page as it is from the minds of downtown smokers.
While this is DCR CMS entry 100, it’s page 96 of the story. The actual page 100 of DCR will be page six, which I hope to get to within the next couple of weeks.
