Weekly update

Over the hump

This week has again felt like another long week where not a lot has been achieved, despite things getting achieved, both artistically and domestically. Part of this achievement was the procurement and destruction of our living room sofa. We have had this enormous leather corner sofa for years; it was a steal and gave us loads of room to stretch out and chill with the dogs. The issue we have had was half of it never got used and just became a dumping ground for all our bits and bats (all her bits and bats mostly), so we got another one, a bit smaller and a bit nicer.

This meant that we had three sofas in out room, along with all our regular furniture, and for most of this week it was a squeeze just to move around and live, let alone relax and do things. So the old sofa had to go, and I spent one sunny morning with a hammer and a crowbar taking it to pieces. This was actually pretty fun, and got a lot of funny looks from the neighbours. But it meant that I didn’t get much done in the way of drawing on Brightspirit.

What I did this week?

Since I have been in a sofa destroying mood, I haven’t been doing much drawing. I mentioned last week that I had done the hardest panel that has been causing me some consternation, and this was a weight off my artistic mind. I still had a difficult panel to do, but it wasn’t as tricky, and I managed to finish it before the sofa debacle happened. Since then I have cleared three more pages of line art, and I am about to head into another headscratcher in terms of drawing.

This chapter has a lot of action. Part of it is dancing, as I said before, and while this was a challenge, it was more to do with the number of bodies in different poses rather than the poses themselves. The dancing is an important part of the character journey and personality, so it is important that I had those panels down the way I want them to be.

The second part of the action in this chapter is a fight with a villain character from chapter 2. This is a challenge because I have to tell an emotional story through action here, but I also have to have that action make sense and be satisfying to look at. I can’t have random scenes of random body poses, and I don’t want to rely on bog standard acrobatics that I see an awful lot.

I can’t claim to be the most amazing artist when it comes to action. I am more inspired and excited by the faces and expressions rather than conveying stunts, but I am keen to get the action right in this chapter, so I want to spent a little more time working on the compositions for the panels. This means I may be a little slower, but in the end it will lead to better results. That is a job for next week though, I still have a page of talking and fun faces to draw.

I also spent a day working on my website, reshuffling some pages, adding some content and sorting out some external links. I have acquired the domain for a Brightspirit website, so I can start building that soon also.

Something I like.

Do you ever watch a movie, or read a book that is a really satisfying single adventure? Or get to the end of a series and think they wrapped it up nicely? It’s a good feeling, but then, there is a sequel, and another, and another! And they are good, but they feel a little phoned in or tacked on. This happens all the time, because people have a good idea and write a good story, and then it becomes successful, or they have new ideas and want to push it onwards. This isn’t to say that all sequels are like this, and some even surpass their original stories. There are, however, a couple of things creators can do to avoid the sequel trap.

Look at Star Wars, a classic story with archetypal characters and amazing special effects. You watch the first one and the empire is defeated, Luke Skywalker gets away and all is good. And then, there is another one, and suddenly, all of the danger and drama is back, and there are some surprise twists. This kind of sequel feels like it was dreamed up after the fact and can feel a little disappointing for viewers and readers who like the conclusion of the first story. Now, Star Wars has committed far worse crimes than this, but it’s not the only franchise guilty of this, and next week I will tell you about another popular movie that has done this.