My initial roughs
Daniel Haddock's linework
The final prologue
A long journey begins
Eyes were first...
My journey towards creating a graphic novel started with the goal of becoming an artist. Little did I know that the first thing I obsessively practiced drawing would turn out to be really important. Starting in 8th grade, I'd draw eyes obsessively until I was satisfied with how they looked. It took so long that I thought that I'd never actually be able to draw a whole body. However, I soon found that I could position 3D physical "mannequins", photograph them, and upload them into Photoshop as an opaque layer for reference. I would re-draw the mannequins by hand and then add the eyes (the one thing I was good at) and it worked pretty well!
I also practiced by drawing the eyes of each character from my favorite manga.
An Award-winning screenplay
Around the time I entered high school, I came up with the idea of a supernatural being in human form battling with robots in the future while managing a relationship with a human. I would invent episodes every night as I went to sleep (I still do!) and later write down my favorite scenes (believe it or not, the Notes app on my phone is my #1 most used application). By 2019, I had compiled all of my favorite storylines into an 80-page screenplay and submitted it to the L.A. County Fair to compete with other creative writers in the area. I anxiously awaited to results and was super excited when I found out that it had won the Sweepstakes award (best overall) for "The Silent War 2086." I had put my heart and soul into the characters and story and began dreaming of publishing it as a graphic novel someday.
finalizing the look of my characters
Introducing Hisao
I knew that if I were to ever publish this as a graphic novel, I would need to finalize the look of my characters. I may have gotten a LITTLE carried away, drawing Hisao hundreds of times, but my goal was to have consistency. I didn't want my characters to look different each time I drew them, and I couldn't think of any shortcut to learn how to do that. I just had to draw them again and again and again until I could recognize them each and every time.
first hand-drawn version of the main characters
The Digital Art Project of a Lifetime
I started officially working on the art for "The Silent War 2086" in a high school class called Media Art. I had an amazing teacher who taught me how to use the latest digital art technology, but it took a whole year just to draw a few pages of the graphic novel. My friends joked that by the time I finished it, it would be take place in the present day. They weren't wrong!
If I ever wanted to finish it, I had to get creative. For example, I found that a helpful way to manage perspective in complicated buildings (e.g. ones with curved surfaces) is creating a model of the building in Tinkercad, a program that allows users to easily form shapes together to make 3D models in the computer. The viewpoint can be set from within the building at any height, and this can be screenshotted and put into Photoshop. Using reference tools like Tinkercad, Blender, and PoseMyArt, and sometimes even posing and photographing physical models, I could overcome my inexperience as an artist. I always enjoy looking for creative solutions to "impossible" problems!
In college, I spent a summer taking zoom classes from a fantastic art teacher overseas who taught me a ton about things I hadn't even thought about, like page design, believability vs. realism, and how to use panels to control pacing. Unfortunately, I realized that the time it would take before I could start publishing chapters was still an insurmountable challenge. As much as I wanted to share my story and characters, I eventually put the project on the back burner.
My first silent war Digital art
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How I went from "I can't do this" to "I can do this ... with help!"
Since I initially lacked confidence in my artistic ability to create high-quality roughs, I assumed I would need to hire artists someday to bring my project to life as a graphic novel. I went on a search for collaborators and evaluated the work of many artists and hired at least a dozen to draw test panels to see if we were a good fit. Some incredible artists responded, but unfortunately, there were also a couple who were secretly using generative A.I. which required me to become adept at distinguishing human-drawn work from machine-drawn work. You really have to inspect the layered source files! While these tests were going on, I went on a hike/art event and rather than draw nature like the other hikers, I decided to draw Hisao being stalked by a robot. It actually wasn't terrible, and I started looking at my art with new eyes. My pencil and paper drawing had precisely the kind of imperfections I was looking for in the test panels as a sign that they were hand-drawn! After all this time, I came to a surprising conclusion: rather than hire an artist to do the pencilwork, why not pencil the panels myself and just hire an experienced finisher who can help me turn my roughs into a professional-looking final product? As I was narrowing my list of potential collaborators down, I saw Daniel Haddock's work and experience and immediately knew he was the one. His history of excellent hand-drawn work was exactly what I was looking for.
It's been a long and surprising journey, but now a new journey has begun as I am working full-time, penciling the 221-page graphic novel while Daniel is doing the inking and coloring. I'm still a perfectionist, so we sometimes iterate 4 or 5 times before I consider a page done. I'm sure I'll still make many mistakes in my art, especially in the early chapters, but I'm now realizing that the mistakes are not something to dread. They are the artifacts that give the work a soul, and prove that I struggled in order to put my vision out into the world.
