Examining My Failure

93 days ago I declared I would hit my first real deadline of having a finished rough draft- color and all- done. 3 days ago, that deadline landed and I was nowhere near close to that. In fact, I never even got to the coloring phase. It was in other words a failure to meet my goal.
I felt disappointed and anticipated it. About 2 weeks away I realized I was not going to make it. If I was a full time illustrator with no other obligation (or full time job) to take care of, I was not going to get this done in the time. (I even posted a countdown on my twitter feed that kind of fell flat and silent.)
Creatively, I have been keeping a steady pace of work up. I can’t say I have avoided doing the work. I believe I could have done more, but I still believe I put in a good deal of work. Part of the reason for this failure over the last 90 days was my learning curve. I didn’t fall victim to any shortcomings by any stretch. In fact, my skill was improving and this was causing several issues with my rough draft. When I went back to work on some of the early pages, i could see my lines were better. It became clear to me that I could re-draw the book about two notches better than when I first drew my panels.
Looking back, I thought I did a great job with some of my initial sketches. But presently, it would have been a bit embarrassing to try and publish anything like that. Failure to meet my deadline was a good thing in point of view. It means I’ll be producing a better work. Will I create a new deadline? No… But I’ll be quick to update you of each step of progress along the way.
See below some of what I was talking about. I’m not DaVinci, but there is a positive change in quality. Thanks for visiting.