fredart : blogbits

It’s a bizarre but delightfully pleasant experience to not only have been done with Monday’s comic ahead of time but to be almost done with Wednesday’s comic on tuesday afternoon.  More often than not when ‘missing’ a comic i actually found myself not able to work on it at all until the evening it is due, so there has been little ‘getting ahead’ in the past six months.  Last week, however, i did manage to get most of ‘Friday’s’  comic done and, rather than posting it Saturday afternoon, made a comitment to see if i could use the boost of having a comic done “early” and then diving into the next comic in the framework of my currently “skewed” work schedule.  Trying to work from a positive position rather than a negative one.  It feels good, i’m hoping i can keep it up.

Why is my work schedule so ’skewed’?  Well, it has a lot to do with the fact that Sarah and I are both trying to work ‘full time’ both here and at the warehouse, we both have a lot to do, and we are trying to raise a baby at the same time (and not using day care).  Since a good part of our work (mostly mine) is working ‘at home’ in theory it’s a great idea… until you find out that taking care of a baby during the day can be a full time job, especially when he has a habit of only sleeping for 30 min at a time >_<.

There are two things that are improving this rather daunting issue.  First, Jack has been taking longer naps (mostly because i think he’s taking a breather from some of the teething hell he went through for a few weeks) and we have a baby sitter that is going to come in from time to time to watch him and give us some much needed work time.  Just one day of her help last week really took a lot of pressure off, as you might be able to tell by the rather positive bent on my infamously problematic production issues.

Part of this will also involve more blogging and ranting.  I’m trying to get over the idea that people don’t want to hear my whining by seeing what i can do to reduce that whining and prattle about more interesting stuffs.  This might not bee particularly interesting, per se, but it’s a fair reflection of things at this particular moment.

That said, comic 1137, FMP 09 is just about done, drawing-wise.  I need to hatch and render some things, then put it together in illustrator (the dialogue is already done).  Doing one comic ahead and posting on time is ok.  Doing two is even better.  Three is a real triumph, but what i really want is to find the norm being that comics are posted ahead of time and are availible at 1am like they are supposed to be, on a regular basis.  It’s been the holy grail of my life as a comic artist, as i am sure you all know, but for once it seems oddly possible… and possible without having to seriously comprimise the art or the content of the comics.  So we’ll see. 

And now for some randomness… i’ve been experimenting with notebook applications, not sure right now if i like Evernote or Yojimbo better.  It’s almost like i wish i could mix the two (With Yojimbo it is all stored locally, evernote is on a server (and you have 40mb or 400mb allowances)…  given how graphic-rich my clipping tends to be, i worry that 400 meg per month might not be enough… i’ll blog more about this in my next post.  Anyone else here using similar programs that act as thier brain repository?

Tags: Jack Obadiah, organization, production

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