Along with blogging every Monday through Friday this year, I also set out to work on my writing projects on a regular basis (Wednesday through Sunday). So far, so good this year. I’m a little late with the blog today (just got off work for the day), but it keeps moving along.
Now, the writing part is easy. Especially for the novels and screenplays. Revising/editing, though I’m good at that, takes a bit longer since my logical brain gets tapped out most days from the day job (disadvantage and advantage of being a techie… your logical brain gets a good workout all day long, but it just wants to kick back and recover the rest of the day). The toughest part of all these projects involves the comic book scripts… and finding artists.
Because of the work I’ve been doing the past few years, I haven’t had to look for artists (work-for-hire doesn’t really leave me much control who I work with and then I also had a couple artists ask me to write for them). Now, I want to get more of my comic stories out there, so I have to wander the wilds of deviantart.com, conceptart.org, Digital Webbing, drawingboard.org and other sites to look over artists and piece together styles with stories.
Sadly, I’ve done this before and I had a list of 34 "artists with potential" bookmarked to possibly use with projects. Twenty-seven of those artists are currently working on books or full-time in the video game industry. The others haven’t updated in months/years, so there’s no telling what happened to them. So, I know I have a good chance at spotting talent to work with…
But talent isn’t everything with comics… talent won’t take you anywhere if you can’t deliver. That combination is a little tougher to find out there. It is out there… I’ve been lucky over the years to work with a number of artists with talent and the ability to turn in pages. Besides, I really enjoy looking through art, so even though the task can be long and require barrels of 80 proof enforced patience, it’s not a torturous process.
So… be vewwy, vewwy quitet. I’m huntin’ artists…
