Artemis Draws

It certainly took me a while to wrap things up, and I can only breathe a huge sigh of relief that it is all over at last. I ran out of steam with the Nighthawks story a fair while ago, and only kept going because I did not want the work to go to waste completely. I was bored of the story, sick of the drawing style and worried that the plot did not have enough momentum at every single point. It just seemed to drag on and on. I was also nearing the bottom of my ink bottle, and yet my natural inclination to be frugal kept me dipping my brush and smearing the sides of the bottle to utilise every remaining drop. I was tired of doing the art work, and I think this shows in many of the panels. The compositions look tired, basic, undramatic. It was all done very hurriedly, more of a sketch than a finished piece of work. I never thought that drawing the inside of a diner was going to be terribly exciting, but I grew tired of it faster than I anticipated at the beginning. I wanted to develop the character of Joe the waiter a bit better before launching the story properly, but this resulted in a lengthy preamble.

I did not plan this as well as the Card Players, admittedly. I started off with a script but I started to extemporise quite quickly afterwards and thus abandoned the script. I kept a framework in my mind, but eventually, the text and word balloons were only added after I had drawn and inked the panels. I scanned the images in and then just typed the words in on the fly. How not to draw a comic book short story…. And as I had many other things going on in my life at the same time, I sometimes took very long breaks between drawing two pages, which resulted in a somewhat disjointed feel. Still, I hope I managed to smooth things over in the end. It is still a little messily put together, but I”ve never been one to be very meticulous over my work. I just hope that it is a reasonably coherent and enjoyable little story. Please – let me know your thoughts.