I'm putting portfolios together for a few different end locations. Apparently I'd forgotten how wretched the portfolio-selecting process is; it's like being asked to harshly evaluate your 27 young children for the likelihood of their succeeding at an incredibly specific profession which you don't understand. Sure, I guess little Susan might make a good trial lawyer? I guess this piece shows design sensibility?

I'm trying to assemble a folio that shows my "process", mostly for people looking for storywork. For me this turns out to be weirdly tricky - it seems in review that I'm kind of like a heat-seeking missile fired on a emergency special ops mission, or a straight male on a shopping trip: fast, focused, and largely untraceable. I think it, I pencil it, the client almost always takes it within the first two rounds, then I finalize it. One piece of paper. Look ma no hands!

Even in my personal comics work I do very little prep-work. My thumbnails take the form of a tiny scribbled box filled with lightly sketched-in layout panel shapes, drawn on what will be the back of the final page. Hell, I wrote Bite Me literally page-by-page, scrawling the dialogue above that little box, occasionally adding brackets to separate the dialogue into panels, and then flipping it over and away we go.

Now I script a certain ways in advance on the computer and use Bristol paper for projects where I need a longlasting original, but still. The knowledge that some people script their ENTIRE BOOK, then thumbnail their ENTIRE BOOK, then rough pencil their ENTIRE BOOK, then pencil THEIR ENTIRE BOOK, then ink THEIR ENTIRE BOOK, then shade THEIR ENTIRE BOOK...it's like trying to explain the entire process of designing, building, driving, and maintaining a motor vehicle to a pony.

The place where I do willingly spend work-up time is in character design, particularly faces and their signature expressions. The only reason I ever started drawing, and kept it up, was to make the characters in my head that much more solid, and then to tell their stories in the most controlled, defined way possible. In comics I get to be the writer and the director and the actors and the camera crew, and I like to spend quality time in casting, because I'm going to be looking at these people for awhile.

The reason why I'm still not a very good illustrator is the same reason why I don't like writing short stories - the people get short shrift at the hands of the form. It's like having to focus on eating an intricate, chilled hors d'ouevre when you are sitting three feet away from a hot turkey sandwich.

And to be fair, even though I talk about being all about the character process, I still won't do more than three or four preliminary drawings - even of a main character, even for a full-length book - before sawing in. It's all in the head, and my inner nine year-old doesn't want to share it until it's so perfect that I can skip the group critique process and jump right to the "praise" stage.

I am bloody impatient, in other words, and I rely on the resources of my good brains and gradually improving autodidact drafting skills to support that temperament.

So I'm trying to focus more on extending my process, both in terms of length and in offering, thus providing some more mature results and giving collaborators and clients an easier entrance into the task. Since I'm stepping up to doing this at a professional level, it's time to be a big girl and share my toys, at least with the people who are financially supporting me.

So, in the spirit of sharing, and of procrastination. Where do you spend your time in your work? What parts do you try your best to skip? Are you trying to change? Have you changed over time? Do you need feedback at every step, or do you play by yourself?