Near disaster — or fear and loathing on the drawing board

I would never have drawn a page of comics if it hadn’t been for Dave Sim’s The Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing. Sim breaks down his whole drawing process in this book. I got so into it that I had to draw once I reached its end.

Here it is:

Sim wrote several times of different disasters that could befall a page of comics, especially using his favorite inking tool, The Hunt 102 crow quill. I’ve always been surprised that more of these disasters haven’t befallen me, because I’ve adopted the crow quill as my chief inking tool as well. I’ve been pretty lucky.

I just had a minor disaster, though. My crow quill fell out of my holder when I went to etch a line and rolled down my page. Fortunately, it mostly rolled down the left edge, outside of the printable area. You can still see a bit of the results in the first panel, photographed above. In this case, a bit of white concealer and it will be mostly okay. I hadn’t even penciled any of the drawing yet.

If it had rolled down the center of the page, though, especially, say, after I had done a lot of complex drawing and inks, it could have really set me back.

Here’s my point: people think of artists as such lackadaisical hippie types. In some ways, artists are. Most artwork, though, is tedious, careful work. You have to really focus to do it and, no matter how big and beautiful it is at the end, when you break the work down, it’s a lot of tiny little, very repetitive efforts. And a small mistake can really louse all that close and careful work up.

Now that I’ve been drawing longer, I’ve had a few more accidents like this, like Sim describes. While in another pursuit, it might well set my temper off, when I’m doing artwork I find myself mostly philosophical about it.

In the making-art mindset, an accident can even be a way to see your work from a useful new perspective. Has anyone reading this had any accidents that were really great?