Activating tunnel mode

Sometimes you gotta focus on one thing only

Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter.

So, what’s this tunnel mode? It can be a rather useful tool if you can master it. But before we go there, let me just tell you that I’ll be at the 41 Comic Barcelona pretty soon. I’ll be there with Rick Remender (and a few other artists that also worked with him), doing panels, signing, the whole thing. Come by if you can!

Tunnel Mode

Basically, when you have a task that you want/need to complete and the clock is ticking, you do nothing but that task, blocking everything else that’s not urgent (other ongoing gigs, email, chores, etc - DO NOT ignore people). That way you get more time to do the one thing you want to get done. That’s what I call “tunnel mode”.

That’s what I did for most of this week. I entered tunnel mode to finish a short story that needed to be finished sooner rather than later. I still did some bits of other things here or there, but 99% of the time was spent inking 10 pages for a thing (a big thing that my 10 pages are only a very small piece of, but more on than once my part is announced).

Now the trick about tunnel mode (in my humble opinion) is that it can’t do it for much longer than a week. Otherwise everything else will pile up until it looks overwhelming, forcing you to go all hands on deck on each of the other things, perpetuating cycles of rather intensive weeks and you don’t want that. Piles of unanswered emails, piles of recycling to do, piles of clothing to do (trust me, with 3 kids and frequent gym visits by both of us, laundry is unending)… So, tunnel mode is an exception, so I only use it as such.

Short Story

The short story I’m working on is only 10 pages long, which is why I accepted doing it in the middle of Phenomena. I worked a lot of it it on the side (reading script, working on thumbnails, even the pencils) until I got to inking.

Because the pages are incredibly dense (literally hundreds of characters in some panels, many others with dozens) I knew this was going to be time consuming. And to make sure I could wrap those 10 pages in a week, I went all in. I’m nearly done now and things will return to normal next week - furiously penciling Phenomena, more time for email and other side things.

Now, how much can I show you of this short story? Next to nothing, so make way for some tiny sneak peeks:

A curiosity: to easily keep things separate in my brain between Phenomena and this short (or any extra gig like last week’s cover), I’ve been inking them with different tools. While I use a nib for most of the inking on Phenomena, I’ve been using pens on the rest:

This is a trick I picked from Tom Hanks. When he was working on Polar Express, he voiced five different characters. Because there was nothing in terms of costumes (it’s an animated movie), he switched shoes to allow his brain to immediately switch between different characters.

Phenomena

Nonetheless, things keep moving on the Phenomena side. Here’s a new character that I cannot wait to ink:

And one page that one of my twin daughters got their tiny hands on. I tried to erase it but she really went for it:

Can’t blame her though. Drawing is too much fun.

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Next week I’ll have a lot more Phenomena pencils to show you + a new commission I’m really excited to get to. A hint - it’s with Doctor Strange.

Until next week!

André