Finished page from my graphic novel PLUS Who am I??

Page 3 form my upcoming comic! (I still got lettering work to do)

Hi!
Now that I have time I wanted to tell you a little more about me (I haven't said much).
I'm a film student at university, I've always loved telling stories, reading and listening to them.
Since I was 7 I wanted to draw classic superhero comics but as I grew older I started feeling bored of them and I distanced myself from the old batman, spiderman and wolverine comics. After that, I was amazed by animation and my dream changed from working in Marvel to working in Pixar.
Once I finished school I decided to do a major in Computer Science. I did two years of CS and a Harvard online course in which I developed my own horror game, it was a reeeallyy cool experience. Here's my final project if you are curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFYKI1RbAMQ
Then I found out about film school and made the tough decision to change my career to follow what I love.
Last year at university was quite awesome, I got to direct a short film which is being presented in festivals around the world and I learned a lot about framing, telling stories, writing scripts, conveying a message and FINISHING stuff.
Through out last year I started reading comics again (A LOT), and I fell in love all over again. I came to read Sandman, a comic written by the F*kn AWESOME Neil Gaiman. I read a couple of Alan Moore's comics. Then I read Craigh Thomson's Blankets... and cried a bit... who doesn't with that awesome comic?. I read Art Spiegelman's Mouse and it literally blew my mind, it's not the type of story I usually like to read.. BUT now is one of my all time favorite books. I read a lot more comics which I'll share in depth in future posts.
After so much reading I decided this holiday I wanted to finally make that comic book I've always wanted. I was inspired by Jason Brubaker (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfMrl0S6VFZGbu35Yb7v5xw) and Jake Parker (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwJheV30gHVOjBps2DU7k9A), and I finally got the courage to sit down and do it.

Three advises I want to leave you with (taken from this two awesome guys):

1. FINISHED! NOT PERFECT
2. If you are making good stuff, eventually people will find you, they'll listen and they will give you feedback.
3. Any time you do anything of WORTH is going to be HARD.
4. SHARE YOUR WORK, and...

JUST. DO. IT.

How to actually START a graphic novel?

If you ever thought of making a comic you probably know how difficult it is. I always try to think even the best ones in the industry had to work really hard to get where they are. We often look at these people with admiration and think "I wish I could do that", but we are not sure how to start.
All my life I've loved comics, remember last post and my Star Wars comics as a child? but in the last couple of years I've been taking it more seriously, and thinking about doing a full comic.
I've been studying drawing with a Marvel artist, I've been learning Audiovisual Design at university, I've seen at least a thousand videos on how to make comics, writing scripts, etc. But I found it really, REALLY hard to start. It's a mixture between being afraid of not meeting your expectations and not knowing where to start.
It wasn't until I saw a couple of videos telling that "It doesn't have to be perfect, it has to be finished", that I said: Lets do it! I'm gonna try.
I sat down, looked at the white screen of my computer and that was it. I didn't know what to write. Two days passed and I had just doddle a couple of characters and had a mere idea on what would be the story about. I also paid attention all time to what message I was going to tell with my story, because one of the things I've learned this year at film school is that even if your work is awesomely cool, if the message you convey doesn't strike you as something you want to tell deep down, you end up being bored or looking at the final piece and saying: Well... it's a really cool nothing.
So once I thought of the message, it was easier to care about the characters and to start having ideas... The problem was that I didn't know how long the story was going to be, I didn't know how much should I do in a day to feel I could be happy with my work, so the whole idea of sitting to work in this giant invisible thing felt veery intimidating, to the point I wasn't writing anything.
It wasn't until I decided to do limit how long my story was going to be (in page amount), and how long it was going to take to do each step towards my goal. I decided it was going to be a 50 page story, because a longer one was going to be too long for a first project and probably would get boring, and not shorter than 50 pages because it would be too short to be worth the effort, and to be able to do something with it once finished (Which is one of the motivations to do so much work for free). As I had a month to write the script, I had to write 5 pages a day.

The artist's excel...

The first day I sat down, tried my best not to act like the writer we all want to be... a cool guy sitting down drinking coffee with a vintage typewriter and a box of cigarettes, I just sat down and wrote until the five pages were done, and it felt awesome! I did that for three weeks.
An other thing very important:  For the first time, I didn't tell the story to anyone, because I found that the pleasure of just telling it made me lazy about actually working on it (I don't know if it makes sense to you... but it worked).
Once I finished the script, it was time to show it to my girlfriend and hope for a verdict. I was trying to do other things while she read the script, but I kept trying to look at how she reacted to each page. Once she told me what she thought and encouraged me to actually do the comic I revised a couple of things, corrected it, and started drawing.
I don't want to make the posts too long, so I'm going to cut it here. In the next posts I'll probably talk about how I plan my pages, thumbnails and how I actually draw it.
If you have any question or request for future post feel free to comment, I would love to answer :)
Till next time!