(There’s gotta be a better name than “Self-imposed comics rehab”… but it’s pretty accurate. I guess I’ll leave it)

Unbeknownst to me, the wife got up at 7:10 AM, so I got off to a bit of a late start. I got to the drawing board around 7:30 because I had to take out some lightbulbs in our kitchen. Tip: if you buy ceiling lights from Ikea (like the previous owner of our condo did), make sure you can get bulbs with the correct wattage outside of the Ikea store… you know, so you don’t put in the wrong watt bulbs and cause your lights to not work.

I ended up going to the bathroom around 4:30 AM, and as I was up my mind figured out what it was I wanted to draw today. Excellent. That part was done. Unfortunately, I’ve always struggled with backgrounds… not that I don’t like drawing really cool-looking backgrounds, but the thing about backgrounds that always gets in my way is perspective. Now, I know a decent amount of perspective concepts, but I always seem to struggle with setting up a scene to demonstrate proper perspective. I have not avoided learning; I’ve acquired a couple books and have looked online for methods I can use to set up perspective grids, how to establish the kind of perspective I need, and how to draw different kinds of objects in perspective. Yet, I continue to struggle.

And all I really needed to draw today was a park bench, set in a park with very little in the way of background objects.

Instead, I spent an hour trying to figure out how to set up the bench within the proper perspective so that I could establish the rest of the scene. And it’s not like I haven’t drawn a park bench before. In perspective.

I knew I’d have to get some of the rust out, but geezus bejeebus, I didn’t get anything else done this morning except set up my perspective grid for the first panel.

The good thing to come from all this is that things should be a bit easier tomorrow morning.