The next drawing challenge

As predicted, I've had very little time this week while my wife was recovering from surgery. Not that she needed a lot of actual medical care; it just meant that all the everyday chores around the house became my job to do, including taking the dogs on two long walks per day, grocery trips and preparing dinner. That plus work plus my daily bike commute made for a very exhausting schedule. Things are settling down now and I have another week's vacation next week, so it's a good time to discuss how I'm going to challenge myself over the next few months. 

Following on the succesful gamification of my hobby over the month of July, my next challenge is twofold:

1. I have to redraw 19 pages of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan that were originally drawn by my wife, skycladstrega, for publication on ComicFury, with the first one of those due on September 15 and the last on November 18 (if any updates inbetween are missed, these will need to be caught up on before the second deadline); and
2. I have to use the reward I gave myself for July's challenge, an OP-1 portable synthesizer, to create a finished track - written, recorded and mixed into something I can publish on Soundcloud, by the final deadline of November 18.

If I win, I will allow myself to buy a new guitar, probably from a local manufacturer that makes really nice looking ones.
If I don't get the pages drawn in time, I will not be allowed to buy a guitar and I will have to pay a forfeit: after I'm caught up, the update frequency of the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan reruns on ComicFury will be increased from two a week to three a week, so that my next big ROCR-related challenge will arrive earlier (that will be adding new pages after the current last page drawn five years ago). 
If I get the pages drawn in time, but don't get a finished track, I won't have to pay a forfeit, but I won't be allowed to buy a guitar until I've won another challenge.

This is a bit more complicated, but there are reasons. The second part of the challenge is there to make sure the expensive instrument I bought for myself after the July update challenge won't sit on my desk unused; if that does happen, then clearly I don't have time to go back to practicing the guitar, so I shouldn't spend money on one. As for the first part, well... win or lose, I wil become more immersed in ROCR and if I lose, I will have to deal with tough deadlines for a while longer.

And these deadlines are tough! The first deadline seems quite a while away, but if I don't work on ROCR everyday from now until then, it'll creep up on me. I can't cheat by using existing pages, because replacing existing pages with new ones is the point; and the pages I'm drawing all have to be visually consistent with the ones before them. That means full color and the occasional technically complicated panel. The pages will be harder for me to do than the Lives of X!Gloop pages from July, where I could mostly rely on the original versions from 1993 and use those as a base to trace the good bits from, so I only had to fully redraw the sucky bits. My plan is to use my one week of vacation to get a good head start and maybe do three whole pages. However, there is a bit of prep work involved: I have to get continuity references for all the characters, prepare some templates and figure out how I'm going to redivide each page into panels before starting production work. And all the while, my wife is still not done with her recovery.

So, fun! And a reason to go incommunicado for most of the day on most days. I can do it, but it'll mean my time management skills and discipline will need to be kicked up a notch. But I get to spend some time learning a new skill of working with synthesizers, which I'm currently amazingly incompetent at.