Takeoff

I figured for this blog, and this story, the beginning is a very good place to start.  The very first thing I wrote about for my journey abroad was, appropriately, the very beginning of it: taking off from JKF airport in NYC and flying into London Heathrow.  Before my semester abroad, I had only been on a plane a handful of times, and had never gone anywhere outside the U.S.  Naturally, I was freaked out at the prospect of being thousands of miles away from basically everyone I knew and loved, on top of the fact that I was going somewhere completely new and foreign to me.  So naturally, I wrote about that.  But in a more poetic way than simply "I have no more bajeezus, for it has all been scared out of me."  

Process pictures!  (Just a note: I don't want to give too much away as to the actual layout because I want there to still be a "whoa" moment at the end when it's all put together, but I will share snippets of final pencilled layouts, just to give you an idea of what the pages are looking like.)

 The pages from my notebook where I wrote my first thoughts, and drew a sketchy self-portrait reflected from the plane window.  (I had a window seat, thank goodness.)

A couple panels from my rough draft version of this part of the story.  Very literal, with me looking out the window of the plane, and very text-heavy.

A snippet of my first attempt for the final pencil draft.  I edited the text very heavily for this attempt.  

Working on the re-drawn pencil draft.  I am keeping the final pencil draft layouts in a hard-bound black sketchbook, and working on them sequentially.  The dimensions are 11x8'', horizontal.

Close-up on the second page of the Takeoff layout.  I am trying to be less literal and work more with the metaphors I created in my writing, and I edited the text even more.  

I'll leave you with those for now.  It's still in the very early stages, as you can see, but I hope you like seeing how it's coming along!  More on the way later.