Long John

My day job is basically all about thinking through a process. In fact, the way I teach academic writing is rooted in how I draw. I was not a strong student, though it was mostly due to the fact that I hated being a student, which led me to eventually flunking out of college.

After a year, which gave me some time to focus, and a long meeting with the Liberal Arts Dean, I got back into the school I flunked out of, but I knew that wasn’t enough. If I wanted to graduate I’d have to find a way to care about school. I asked myself a simple question, “if I find school difficult to do, what do I already do well and can I apply how I do that to getting schoolwork done?”

Art was the obvious answer––I knew how to make a drawing. So, I disassembled my artistic process and tried to apply it to things like studying and writing papers and, for me, it worked very well.

That kicked off a lifelong interest in this thing called “process” across all spectra of creativity––it’s interesting how so many people can accomplish the same thing but in unique ways. Success is not always about creating a process, but more about finding the process that helps you get stuff done, which is literally all I do for my students.

But that interest persists in my artistic life and––as I’ve become more active on social media like Instagram––I find I’m chronicling my process more and more, moving from the sketchy mess of a layout to the inked lines of a final panel.

 

 

 

 

 

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I did my best to capture the process of drawing this panel. This is a pretty faithful look at the standard progression of a panel from sketch to final inks. :::::: ::::: :::: ::: :: #art #webcomic #comicbooks #independentcomics #longjohncomic #draw #inking #makecomics #pendrawing #bluepencil #western

A post shared by D. Bethel (@dbethelcomics) on Aug 7, 2019 at 5:59pm PDT

While looking through a folder on my desktop titled “Drawing Videos”, I came across one I never finished editing. It was recorded near the end of Chapter 3, so while not immediately relevant, it does show an interesting process I have had to use when making Chapter 4––what happens when I need to redraw a panel?

Enjoying this strange synchronicity (as the beginning of the semester approaches, I find that I ruminate more about process than normal), I decided to finish up the video––complete with commentary––that shows how I go from a page with a very bad panel to a finished page with a much better one.