A few months back I announced that had become the first client to ever pay me for sequential work. It was an extremely exciting event in my life.  I'm pleased to announce that I've finally finished the art on all five pages of the short.



It was an extremely valuable educational experience for me. I learned a lot about my own process (mostly where it doesn't work and needs to be perfected) and visual storytelling. I'm extremely grateful to Scott for taking a chance on me with this as they are lessons I'd never have learned otherwise. Being pre-paid for the work meant it had to get done. That meant getting past my own worst enemy: me. I have the hardest time accepting my artwork as complete. This is a problem if you ever want to be read. So I had no choice but to get things to a point where I simply didn't hate them and move forward to the next page and so on until all 5 were done.

Even so Scott was extremely patient with my own need to rework pages. I must have redrawn panel 1 of page 1 10 times before I finally decided I had to move forward even my work wasn't perfect. I'd say that is the single most valuable lesson I learned from the experience. I also learned that drawing for someone else exercises a brain muscle that drawing for yourself does not. Fortunately for me Scott is an extremely easy client to draw for. He's almost too appreciative of whatever I'd show him. So much so that I was relieved when he finally told me a panel didn't work and I had to redo it. Relieved because it meant he actually liked my other pages and wasn't just too nice to say otherwise.

I'm going to be taking a lot less pin-up style commissions for a while so that I can try and solicit more sequential client work. I just learn and grow so much through that process that I think I really need to focus on that kind of work for a while. I might take a crack at some contest work if I can find it. And if I can scare up more anthology clients like Scott I'll be taking those on as well.