Part 5: 'Till my hand stopped working

The thing I was the most dissapointed by was the lack of durability of my hand. It was partly my fault because of the materials I used: an erasable non-photo blue pencil on smooth bristol board. In order to be erasable (kind of pointless now that I think about it since the point of the non-photo blue pencil is that you don't have to erase it), the blue lead has to be hard enough that very little color comes off of it, and this is especially so on smooth paper with no texture. I was thinking that it would save me time erasing the penciled lines after I inked it, and the erasability was in case I really wanted to erase. The effect was that I had to press extremely hard, and that took it;s toll after about 6 hours of constant drawing. By the time I managed to finish the last page's pencils and thus complete the story, not only was my hand in extreme, extreme pain, but I'd lost all control with it, and I liked what I'd just come up with too much to screw up by trying to ink it right then. It felt like the skin had been crushed into the bones of my fingers, and it actually hurt for about a week when I wrote. Besides, it was 8am and I was emotionally and physically exhausted to say the least. I figured the work had earned the right to be inked by someone who wasn't rushing. I feel that penciling can be loose but inking is more draftsmanship than creativity, and my hand just could not be relied on. I slept soundly all day.