---
title: One step further ahead
author: nek0
tags:
- english
- writing
- comic
description: "Some nice things have happened in tha past month"
---

Hi there!

Some time hase passed since my last update and there has been some great
progress. First off: The story outline for my comic or rather series of short
comics is finished!

While being occupied with other things like work, event planning and my ever
returning mental health issues I was unable to work on the story of my comic
very much. What I was able to do, was to draw some reference for one of my main
characters, which led to me drawing a lot (about 20) different facial
expressions of this character for practicing conveying emotions better, which
had been a problem before.

After that I explored a little bit the options of how to color my comic and
came to the conclusion, that most of the comic will be black & white, since
this mode of (not) coloring leads to faster production of pages. Shadows will
be handled as simple cel-shading using semitones as well as hints of color
values. Special pages or panels will be in full colour though.

The nicest breakthrough with my comic happened just this weekend, where I was
able to sit down with my older brother and discuss the story a bit. I already
had a good beginning and a fairly decent ending, but my middle part was still
an unsolidified mess of ideas for possible events.

The process was quite simple in retrospective: I began telling my brother the
story as far as I had it from the beginning and whenever I reached a point of
unsolidified ideas or outright plot holes he would ask critical questions and
we would discuss possible solutions to the problem at hand. A great help in
this whole process was, that my brother at this point was not very well
acquainted with the story, so he head an unbiased and uninformed view on the
whole construct.

The resulting story outline is shorter than I had expected, but it is in
a way the "minimum viable product" to tell the story. Now that the story is
more or less defined and in place I can begin drawing storyboards and layouts
for the individual pages. As always: nothing is set in stone. I might deviate
from the story outline spontaneously during the drawing step, but at least I
have a plan with a finite scope.

So much for this update. I hope to keep you updated here and on my
[art portfolio][art] without spoiling too much of the story.

Keep calm and wash hands.

[art]: https://art.nek0.eu
