Process.

Or what to do when you're stuck.

Let’s not tell my physical therapist that I sit like this when I sketch.

March is full of overlapping deadlines. Something I try to avoid whenever possible, but publishing delays and life have conspired to make this month one of the craziest in awhile. Crazy work life means everything around me turns into a big old mess and I turn into an email black hole. (sorry if you are waiting on an email from me.)

The insane state of my studio at the moment – although to be fair, I just moved out of a different space, so some of it is stuff that needs to be unpacked…except it will probably still be there in a month or two because, busy.

Because February was so full of sickness, I am behind and that is not where I like to be. So March is BUSY. I made myself a strict schedule and it doesn’t allow for procrastination. Which is a problem for ADHD me.

Everything was going well until I just got STUCK.

I got into a funk and nothing was working. My characters weren’t working, I couldn’t get my sketches to tip over from vague to concrete enough to send to my art director. I just couldn’t move forward.

There are a million ideas for what you can do when you are stuck. All of my favorites involve taking time off. But I don’t have time to not work right now, I am on a schedule. So instead, I tried something else.

I changed the medium I was working in.

My normal process looks like this:

Sketchbook doodles and thumbnails to figure out characters and scenes, then on to the tablet to sketch them out digitally over and over (and print them out and stare at them periodically) until they look good.

That’s it. That’s the end of the sketch process.

But it wasn’t working this time, So I printed out my messy sketches and sat down at my desk and traced over them in pencil, refining as I went along. And magically all of the things I was struggling with went away and I could see my characters more clearly.

Why did this work? I have no clue. I’m sure there is some science-y thing to explain it. But I suspect that the change in medium gave me a change in perspective. I couldn’t think about my work the same way with a pencil. I couldn’t undo, only erase, and not very well. I couldn’t zoom in. My canvas ended at the end of the page so I could see the whole picture. Maybe it made me think more before I made a stroke. Maybe it made me think I was drawing in my sketchbook and so it was less pressure. Whatever it was, it helped.

I redrew everything in pencil, fixing everything that I couldn’t seem to get right digitally and then I scanned them back in and redrew them digitally because I am a weirdo and don’t like to send actual pencil sketches.

“final” because these are actually my first sketches and may change again.

Did this take longer? Yes. Was it annoying and did I waste more time resisting the fact that I needed to change something to move forward? Also yes.

But, now I know that this can help me get unstuck and even if it adds extra steps, its another tool in my box to use when things aren’t going right but I still need to move forward.

On Monday, I will package everything up and send it off to my art director. On time. Whew.

And then, onto the next deadline. They just keep coming.

See you next week,