Tag: Tutorial

Years ago, I tried my hand at music. I made friends with a couple of brothers who had a band. Each of them, independently of one another, asked if I wrote any original songs, instead of just playing cover versions of songs. When I said that I had some bits and pieces of songs laying around, each of them—independently again—said “Those bits aren’t gonna finish themselves.”

Such a simple thought, but that’s some of the best creative advice I ever received. Just like giving yourself permission to fail, and building a daily creative habit, learning how to finish your work is another important step toward making comics.

DC won’t let you take over Batman on the strength of the two pages you’ve written. Marvel won’t give you an exclusive contract because your partially penciled page looks great—no matter how amazing those two panels are—even without backgrounds! And Scholastic won’t make you the next Raina Telgemier or Jeff Smith on the strength of an unfinished outline and character sketches for your YA masterpiece.

None of that will happen until you start finishing stuff.

There’s a saying, “Done is better than perfect.” I’ve heard it used in relation to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who claimed they had it painted on the walls of their offices.

Before we talk about what this means, lets talk about what it doesn’tmean. It doesn’t mean that you should hack out a bunch of mediocre stuff. 

Remember that.

So what does “Done is better than perfect” mean, then? It’s meant to remind us that the pursuit of perfection can lead to paralysis. It’s meant to remind us that building a body of work involves creating a body of work, not just one perfect piece. It’s meant to remind us that we have permission to fail if we’re going to grow creatively—you’ll learn more from making a finished failure than you will from an incomplete masterpiece.

Since we’re talking about creating comics, here are a couple of comics legends on perfection. 

Jack Kirby said “Damn perfection,” and John Buscema famously said “Throw your eraser away.”

So go and finish something this weekend!

Inspiration:that intangible, ephemeral, fleeting thing that galvanizes the soul of every artist. It’s that cathartic flash of creativity that jolts ideas into art. It’s rare, and magical, and impossible to quantify. It’s the engine that drives artists and creatives to make magic.

You know what else it is? 

It’s a load of crap.

Don’t get me wrong. Everyone has those flashes of brilliance, when an idea explodes in your brain. That’s great. It’s awesome when it happens. But that level of creative fire is unsustainable. If you only create when you’re inspired, you’re not gonna create much.

Author Octavia Butler says it best, “Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.”

No one expects you to just sit down and start logging 8-hour days immediately. Everyone’s schedule is different, and you may be juggling a job, school, family, or any combination of those things. But if you can start small and begin to build your creative habit, you’ll be able to flip the switch easier, and maximize your windows of opportunity. 

It’s easy to get started. It is. Trust me. And all it takes is 2 minutes.

Set aside 2 minutes a day for the next week. It can be in the morning, or after work, whatever works for you. But try to do it at about the same time every day, preferably in the same place every day.

What you’re going to do is take this 2 minute block every day and work on something. Writers: it can be journaling, it can be working on a comic script, a screenplay, or a novel. Artists: you can do gesture drawing, work on a comic page, paint a still life…whatever.

There are a few rules:

1) Work at approximately the same time every day

2) 2 minute minimum. You can work longer, if you like, but you should log at least 2 minutes every day.

3) Stick to the same general thing every day. Don’t journal one day, and write a comic script the next. Artists, don’t do a comic panel one day, and start a painting the next. Try to focus on the building block approach with your habits for now.

It’s easy to get lost in this. When establishing a habit, that’s the fun part! Every time I set aside 2 minutes, I end up going 5-10—or more!

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step—or 2 minutes of creative time! Take that step!

One of my favorite questions I’ve seen asked on social media is “What advice do you have for someone starting out?” or “What’s the one piece of advice you wish you’d know when you were starting out?”

It’s simple. You will never feel ready. 

I wasted years waiting until I felt like I was good enough to draw comics. I worked in the roleplaying game industry for about a decade, and the whole time, I thought I was warming up to draw comics. But you know what I never did during that warm-up period? 

I didn’t draw a single comic page. 

The whole time, I kept thinking that when I was “ready,” I’d start on comic samples. But I never felt ready. My level of craft improved, for sure. But I never had that epiphany where the heavens parted, I was bathed in sunlight, and a cherub appeared to me and welcomed me into comics. 

How it really worked out was that one day I realized that I wasn’t waiting until I was ready, I was afraid of failing. I was afraid that instead of bursting out, fully-formed, with amazing, world-altering stuff, I’d create a mediocre page—or a terrible one.

But I also realized that nothing was going to happen until I started making comics, regardless of if I felt ready. So I started drawing samples. And they weren’t great.. But the more I did it, the better they got.

You’d think that this simple revelation would have clicked for me across multiple aspects of making comics, right? It didn’t. It took me another few years before I started writing. Same feelings and worry. Same “What is I fail?” BS.

So don’t wait until you feel ready. Give yourself permission to fail, permission to create garbage, permission to learn on the job. Diving into the process will help you develop your skills.

I’ll leave you with a quote from poet Samuel Beckett: “Try again, fail again. Fail better.”

I’ve included some work from this period (1997–1999): a couple of RPG illos (for Traveller and Shadowrun) and one of my first comic sample pages (a generic romance sample page). Be gentle when checking this stuff out!