OilCan Drive Update

Some kind of cold-sickness-bug has had me down for the past week or so.

It's been one of those colds where it's not so bad that it keeps you bed-ridden but it makes it really hard to do much more than sit on the couch and watch movies. But, last night it broke and I went out for a bike ride to get my legs moving once again. This morning, other than the sniffles, I felt better than I had in a week. So, things are looking up.

The last we heard about OilCan Drive I had decided to put it on the back burner for a while. I had written a full length 120 page movie style script for a story and had planned on drawing it out as one long graphic novel. Of course, 120 pages of written word, I found out, translates to about 250-300 pages of drawn comic book pages. With no down time on the horizon, I had to put the book down and focus on the paying work.

But, around Christmas, I had a week or so off and, as my head cleared, I thought about what I enjoyed about the concept of OilCan Drive and what I'd really like to do with it. I decided to push back all the comments and game plans I had heard from other people about what I should do with the project and tried to really focus on what made me the happiest. Not if it would sell or not, not to try and gain the approval of some faceless critic, and not to follow what people said "would work".

Just what would make me happy.

So, with some down time on my hands I've begun working again on the OilCan Drive project.

And, while I'm not ready to reveal the plans I have yet I do have a bunch of pages I drew from the graphic novel, movie script idea.

This two page sequence was the initial lead-in to the story. I always liked the idea of an introduction of some sort and the idea of Ryan sitting behind a table in a dark room being grilled about his past seemed a nice way to do that. It gave the reader a quick glimpse of things to come and a few story questions.

These pages also were a first for me in that I was trying to duplicate things I had done in the past by hand with the new digital medium. Photoshop makes it easy enough to do anything you want to do to a piece of artwork. But, in this book, I wanted to give myself rules and limitations. I wanted it to look like I had cut zip-a-tone shading film and spattered ink across the page with a toothbrush. I wanted it grittier than most polished artwork you see out there these days.

So, if nothing else, I learned some new ways to do old things from the first few initial pages of the OilCan Drive graphic novel. And, you can bet I'll be using those lessons in the new project. And, I have a few more pages from this book so I'll post them soon enough.

For now, back to work...