A Wings Sneak Peak and a Lesson About Challenging Yourself

Along with giving some background info about Wings, this post is testimony as to why it's good to challenge yourself as an artist, but why you shouldn't challenge yourself to the point of losing motivation.

These are preliminary pictures of my manga, so the bright blue digital guidelines are still there--for now, anyways.

 I am a genre mixer.  I mix, splice and combine genres like a story writing Dr. Frankenstein.  My last manga, Mascara, was a romantic dramady.  Wings, although listed as a psy-drama is also in a way a slice-of-sci-fi.  In fact, for a story that's not set in the future and has nothing to do with saving the world, Wings has a lot of science fiction elements.

The story that I thought was going to be my next short manga was about a girl who wears mechanical wings and saves thousands of lives by preventing the destruction of an alternate dimension.

After the script was almost done,  I realized that I couldn't draw it. I couldn't move myself to draw more than one page of it. I was paralyzed from fear. Fear that I could not draw this sci fi manga with the required technical precision and integrity, although I probably could. Bleh.

So I decided that I should go back to the real-life themed manga that I'm used to drawing, but I still wanted to be challenged. After stopping on my sci fi manga,  I came up with the plot for Wings. While creating Michelle, the main female character,  I decided that she would be writing a story. And wouldn't it be cool if the story she's writing just happens to be related to the manga that I wasn't able to finish?

I was able to combine this sci fi story about mechanical wings with this dramatic psychological story,  and it's surprising how it works. The fictional story about the mechanical wings totally parallels what's going on in Michelle's life. And I also get to draw cool sci fi machinery and even a little bit of action without feeling overwhelmed.

I believe that crossing genres is one thing that can make a story very unique.

Will I ever draw the original science fiction story I created?  I don't really know. Maybe one day. As for now,  I'm working towards finishing Wings, a psy-sci-fi-drama. I've finished drawing all of the pages! All that's left is ink and tone. ^_^