Nige's new comic and my next step.
Nigel Auchterlounie (creator of Gone, Pigboy and Bunny Girl, etc.) came around with his new comic strip for the Andy Richmond / Shane Chebsy collaborative anthology. It's really good, he drew the panels A4 and then scanned them in and stuck them together to make a 2 page strip. It made think about my format and way of working. I'm going to need to rough out my panels as early on as possible. Planning like this means that if I want to work really big I can, because I will know how it will all fit together later.
The other thing I want to do is work out some character sheets. Apart from helping me with the writing of the characters, it will also help me stick to a consistent look throughout the year. I've never bothered with this before, but then again I've never worked on one long piece before. I think any major inconsistencies with the characters will really distract from the narrative as well as looking disjointed and clumsy. I like looking at animation character sheets because they often have how not to draw the character as well as the correct way. I think this approach will help me really pin down a lot of traits and attitude of the character. There are some good model sheet archives over at www.animationmeat.com.
So, I think, by the end of this term I would like to have my character sheets and rough panel lay outs done.