Day One of a Bold New Era!

It begins!!

It's 7:11 am, April 9th, 2012, and I've got a hot cup of green tea and my fur-lined slippers warming my feet. The window shade is open, showing off the typically sunny blue Colorado sky. I find myself staring at the blank white screen that we've all seen in so many movies or TV shows, where the writer sits down to write and then stares at the blinking cursor and thinks, "...So now what?"

This post is the first in a series about my newest graphic novel project. I won't reveal much just yet, but I will say that it's a western, and it's a story that I've been formulating in my head for a couple years now.

For much of the remaining year I'll be plugging away at this project, from writing, to art, to lettering and design and everything else, and documenting the process here. I'll be posting pre-production art as it's completed, and blogging about the experience. The inspired moments and the frustrated ones, triumphs and failures, strikes and gutters. All this, along with thoughts on tools and processes that I stumble upon that will, with any luck, help speed the process along.

It's my hope that this blog will serve as a helpful journal of the process of creating a self-published graphic novel story. Or, at least, keep me on track. The blog is in large part inspired by the efforts of Jason Brubaker and Nate Simpson, both of whom took on the same task with amazing results. The other major inspiration has been my brother Jordan Kotzebue, creator of the excellent webcomic Hominids. He's been motivated and consistent, rocking his book week after week, and it's been nothing short of inspiring. Recently I had the honor to contribute to the comic a bit, providing coloring duties for the last 8 pages. It's been a fun way to get my feet wet again after a long perid of inactivity. Thanks to Jordan for that, and more, which I'll talk about more very soon.

On Thursday comes Part Two!

'Til then- here's a sample page of the coloring I did for Jordan's Hominids book.