Ryan Maloney spends his first two hours each day on his graphic novel The Night My Bed Turned into a Submarine, aiming for 1-2 pages using Procreate on iPad. He sketches, inks, and assembles pages in the Pages app, focusing on small daily progress over perfection.
Chapters
Morning routines really don't matter unless they get you in the zone to produce something every day. Here's mine. This won't be a food video or a breakfast video or a morning routine video. This is about creating something every single morning and letting it compound and turn into something. Let's start sketching. Today I'm continuing work on The Night My Bed Turned into a Submarine. It's a graphic novel. I'm just taking it page by page, doing 1 to 2 pages per day. I'd love to do more, but it's hard to find the time with my other client work. I spend the first 2 hours of every day of the year working on personal projects or big risk projects. Sometimes they're partnership projects, building up brands, pitching them to people, partnering with people. And the night my bed turned into a submarine is one of those projects. Here's a look at my drawing tools. I'm usually using Procreate with an iPad pencil. I'm drawing all the pages in Procreate and then I'm exporting them as JPEGs and building the book in the Pages app on the iPad. I want to build everything on the iPad just to keep it mobile and be able to create the book wherever I go. I'm not 100% sure that building the book this way will work out, but it looks pretty promising right now. I'm building it in Pages. Once I color it in, it'll be really easy to upload it to the Apple Bookstore or to export it as a PDF and send it to KDP. I believe it's KDP, maybe, or Amazon Kindle. In this page of the story, Till, our main character, is going to meet the bus driver, Gruffin. He's gonna learn the backstory about Gruffin and learn that he's the boat shop owner also. And the boat shop is where they sell the Golden Compass souvenirs. And the lure of the town is that the Golden Compass is connected to a huge treasure at the bottom of the loch. Now Grumpus sells plastic Golden Compasses. They're just souvenirs. But Gruffin knows more about the story than he's letting on. Moji, Till's best friend, fills him in on all of this. And Moji even has a skateboard with the lore of the lock painted on the bottom. I'm using the Studio Pen in Procreate. It gives me the smoothest lines and allows me to flow the fastest. You'll see me undo a lot when I'm drawing. I'm never satisfied with my lines, and I'm sure anybody watching this video feels that same way. But the most important— the most important thing is just getting the story out there. And not worrying about all the little details, and hopefully that the, the larger sum of the book will drown out any imperfections that you have. Once I get my black line drawings in, I like to go in and put white highlights. I'm eventually going to color these pages in, and I'll do that in another video once I figure out if and how I'm going to color all these pages. I'm doing all my talk bubbles, just custom shapes. I should probably template this out, but I want it to look rough and hand-drawn. Right now I'm going back in and putting details, black line details. I don't know what you call these— sketch line details— to fill in some color and to move the eye around the page. And you can use lines like this to create feeling in the page, create darkness and holes in the page, create some anxiety in the page. It's little details like this, adding these dotted lines on the talk bubbles that sort of connect you to the drawings even more. It makes you put this extra effort in, and it's going to make your work stand out. So I'm always— I always take the extra time to to put these little details in. So this is the look at about one morning's drawing, if that makes sense. One morning's worth of drawing. You have to have a lot of patience to make a book or to make anything, any type of creative, creative project. Usually it's 1 page per day, 2 pages per day maybe, but it all compounds. And after a year, you look back and you have a ton of work produced. It really comes down to routine and discipline and just doing a little bit every single day to move things forward. Thanks for watching.
