I’ve been working on chapter 1.1 of 2071. I scanned all the pencils I had and have been drawing digitally this week. I went from working in 600 dpi to 300 which has made both file sizes and actual drawing sizes more manageable. I really like the stumpy pencil photoshop brush (V2) though I’m still trying to settle on a proper inking brush. I downloaded this one but haven’t tried inking anything with it yet. There’s a lot of stuff I’ve known about in photoshop but never used that much until recently. I made an action that expands a selection by 2 pixels and fills it with the foreground color. Right now I’m using it to fill spaces while inking though it should come in handy when I’m coloring again. I know folks who swear by the flatten and multifill plugin. I also really like the floating lineart and convert white to transparent actions.
Status of the blog 5-26-11
I’m trying to get into the habit of waking up at 5 and working on 2071 until noon or so, then winding down by experimenting with pin ups and stuff for a gallery. Problem is I tend to be in the starting frame of mind early in the morning. Once I’ve been drawing a few hours the part of my brain that decides how to lay out a new image shuts off. It’s hard to get out of render and refine mode. Usually I get stuck looking for references and don’t start drawing again. I need to get better at giving myself assignments for the day. I’ve got lists of images to draw I just need to rough them out enough so I can transition to them later when I’m starting to lose it.
In other news, I’m enjoying following people on tumblr nowadays since there’s a bunch of people on it. Haven’t posted anything on it since I stopped feeding my twitter into it but I might drop some of my experiments in there. It’s neat for following inspirational image accounts and I actually talk to people I know on there. Really I’m just looking for real conversation at this point. So many people set these things up as little outposts for themselves and it’s like seeing a bunch of billboards that all say “Buy my book!” Either that or I get the feeling people are talking to me while they happen to be checking their iphone and doing 5 other things. That’s sort of convenient I guess but I’m not a game for people to pause.