Works in progress

It’s been hard these past two months to work on my personal projects. Between my four week vacation, I’ve taken freelance jobs where I’ve had to travel and work long hours…As a result, I kind of feel exhausted. I guess I’m at the phase in my projects where it feels like it will never be complete. But there has been some slight progress. First up:

The Triassic

The book that starts out the Mesozoic series. So the good news is that the American Museum of Natural History has more Mesozoic fossils on display than Paleozoic ones, which makes it a bit easier for me to get reference. The bad news is that now, it’s really hard for me to choose which animals to show in the book. I usually pick really strange animals or ones that are important in terms of evolution (for instance,  the earliest mammal, or the earliest tortoise), but then it’s hard to place together all these animals in a way that makes sense…I wouldn’t want to do the Mesozoic equivalent of having a polar bear alongside a tiger, but it’s probably going to be unavoidable to some degree. So that’s the issue I’m having right now: which animals go on which section of the accordion.

The Desert

So this particular book has been in the works for 10 months… Why has it taken me so long? Well I’ve devoted more of my free time on the printing pf the Paleozoic books printed than working on this, but there’s also this feeling of frustration I’m battling. I’ve wanted to do a book that takes place in the desert for about 7 years, but couldn’t figure out what the story would be. Last year, I finally made up a story, but now I’m frustrated with the quality of my drawings. And I recently showed the dummy to someone, and discovered I needed to fix a few panels / pages to get the story to flow better. I always start to lose a bit of my enthusiasm for a project when I need to work something over at a late stage…What keeps me going is that I have never given up on a project this late in “development” so hopefully this will be done one day soon…fingers crossed…