If you haven’t been following my sad saga about trying to make graphic novels, you can catch up by reading about how the old comic book bug was first rekindled, then my frustrating experience with one artist.
Not being a masochist, I cut my losses, paid the latter for wasting my time, and regrouped.
Back to the drawing board. Pun intended.
I found another artist with a page rate I could swing; and he seemed to understand English pretty well. He was a Manga artist, but said he could draw American-style comics. Since I wanted a more classic, simplistic style anyway (remember: I thought it would be cool if it was a similar style to Milton Caniff or Alex Raymond), I thought it could work out.
I decided to have him try Page 1, and do it in black & white to see if the style was a good fit before thinking about color.
The same kind of issues haunted me as with the previous artist. I literally had to give him the same directions 5 times before he would follow them. Going through that for every panel on a 90-page graphic novel is something I just don’t have the patience for.
After 14 days. he had this, which is much closer to what I wanted:
Some stuff I just had to let go. Two of the characters are supposed to be older; but after telling him this over and over and over and him ignoring it, I figure he’s probably never gonna do it for whatever reason.
I wasn’t going to give up; but I was done with Fiverr and maybe even trying to hire artists.
One reason I had been ready to sink thousand$$ into this project was because time is such a precious commodity and drawing is extremely time consuming. Learning how to draw, then drawing, takes even more time. But that appeared to be the only way this was gonna happen, now.
“I have to draw it myself,” sez I.