What I Did Today

Finished that page of inks today. Still need to fill all the spot blacks on this batch but it’s something I can do while unwinding much like flat fill coloring. I’m trying to decide for backgrounds if I prefer the clean look of the line tool or the hand drawn one of the brush. Line tools and such can look cold and mechanical though sometimes you want that precision. The more I work on this comic the more I’m going to do things by hand with the slight imperfections (and sometimes fairly obvious ones) that add a personal touch to it. As an artist you kind of lose track of the over all impact when you’re zoomed in at 300% and making marks. It’s always good to come back to something after you make it and give it an honest eye. Sometimes there’s stuff you appreciate more after the fact, things you realize. I’ve redesigned characters to bring back an original feeling the earlier drawings evoked. Lately I’ve been keeping character drawings up so I’m reminded what they look like. It’s amazing the minor variations you can give to drawing the same thing that changes how it reads. Drawings and characters always evolve. I think it’s also the cartoonist’s nature to simplify. To make things more iconic and memorable.

Slept in this morning to try and even out the tiredness I’ve been feeling lately. It’s probably stress from something I’ve been working on that I’ll talk about later. Frustrating and an energy drain but it should be sorted out now. Hopefully everything connected to it goes smoothly.

Inked about half a page today. I always want to do more but we’ll see how I feel in the morning. Today feels like a long day but seems like a short one considering the late start. I’d much rather be up early knocking work out so I can relax in the evening, personally. Though on hot days working on a warm screen while the sun’s out feels gross.

I’ve been dealing with some referer spam lately which is also pretty gross. Whenever I see a new one pop up I block it. I used to not even know what it was but now I feel offended. As opposed to email spam where I usually think, “Wow, good on you for getting through my filters. Now I will banish you never to be heard from again.”

Gave myself the weekend off to clean up my media library. It was nice to dive into something that wasn’t comic-related so I appreciated jumping back into work this morning. Spent the day tightening pencils and inking a page. Probably could have done two but the backgrounds required a lot of detail. I’m going to revisit this one on a later day and fix the perspective. I got done laying lines and realized things were pointing in different directions. I’ll free transform things until it all makes sense. I’m free handing lots of things because I don’t like fiddling with rulers. I should probably take a day and get more comfortable with them. They’re powerful but every time I’ve used them it’s a hassle to configure and then if you want to move things you have to stop and fiddle. It just breaks up the flow of working. I have a similar issue with switching brushes and line widths. I know it looks nice to intentionally work in set widths for certain elements but I’d rather just rely on pressure sensitivity and wing it. Luckily the style of the comic is that slightly askew hand drawn look.

I’m feeling better about what I’ve got done so far and how I’m progressing. I just need to stop feeling like I’m on some running clock. As long as I get up and work regularly I should allow myself breaks. I picked up Broforce on the Steam sale. It’s a fun game, if a little buggy. It doesn’t work properly with my PS3 controller on my Mac so I had to map keyboard controls to it with Joystick Mapper. I’ve made it up to stage 25 in the arcade campaign mode. I tried world campaign and couldn’t get past the select screen. Still going to tweak the controls some because it’s easy to die if you don’t have a good handle on the controls.

Today I decided to rework a character design I hadn’t fully fleshed out. I think it’s important to not just have a stock “guy with a beard” or “girl with glasses” you always pull out, especially if they’re going to be a regular character. There’s so much personality you can bring with subtle variations. Do they wear their glasses up high or down low? Is their big hair crazy and all over the place or does it pull itself in one direction? The more often you draw them the better understanding you have of who they are. Even if you’re holding on somebody’s face there’s little changes you can enact that tell a little more about what’s going on in their head.

I inked some more today until I totally gave up on being productive. This weather makes me want to melt into a puddle. I spent my evening cleaning up my media library for Kodi and PseudoTV Live. I have to bring the media in properly so it scrapes all the related info. What doesn’t scrape is going to need directory channels and whatnot. (Because scraping is great unless you have an ancient movie or obscure program that doesn’t have an internet listing.) I’ve spent so much time and energy thinking about the comic it’s nice to move away from working on it to do some tedious organizing. Like when Trey Parker builds lego sets to drain off the stress of working on South Park.

Had trouble falling asleep last night so I turned my alarms off and slept in. Got to like 88 degrees today. Turned my AC on and mostly inked in the evening because drawing on a hot cintiq screen when it’s humid is ew. It’s starting to set in just how big these updates are going to be. I’m drawing 14-15 panels a page. That’s fine when I’m in the zone. When my energy’s zapped from the heat I start asking myself, “Just how long is this thing?”

I’m liking the project, it’s just something I’m going to have to pace myself on. I’m bad about taking breaks and I’m bad about getting back to work after taking them.

Second work session of the day went alright. Was drawing enough to be doing it well, just not totally knocking it out of the park. Getting to sleep wasn’t that easy with the sun still being up. I have extra curtains in my bedroom but even then it took awhile. I also kept fading in and out, eventually getting up at 5 instead of 7 as planned. Spent my time tightening pencils and started inking a page. I’ve got 5 pages in various stages of completion. Think I’m going to save coloring for the weekend. I’m really starting to like the characters the more I draw and write them.

Spent the morning penciling pages. Also started writing a 3rd page. Things went slower than yesterday but still decent. Decided I’m going to get a few hours sleep and see if getting up later this evening helps any. I’ll post a second WIDT at the end of it. I’ve got pages to ink and pencils to finish so it’ll be interesting to see which I’ll feel like working on.

Got up at five this morning and penciled two pages. Felt on my game and everything. Was hoping to ink them after lunch but that didn’t happen. Had to take care of some housework and got tuckered out. I need to figure out the second half of my day better. I keep getting tired after lunch. I’ve tried napping but never feel like getting more work done. If anything I tend to feel more drained after a nap.

One thing I’ve tried before is dividing my days into two working chunks and getting a longer sleep in the middle. It becomes an issue whenever you have to deal with other people.

“Hey, want to go out for dinner?”

Sorry, I have to be in bed early for my biphasic sleep cycle. :V

Still probably worth doing. It’s a better use of my time to be sleeping than sitting here unable to work.

I spent my evenings during the weekend flat fill coloring pages. This morning was an attempt to return to my usual routine of waking up early. I finished flatting the last two pages so now I can either draw and work on more pages or spend time on each one adding gradients and figuring out rendering. I think it’s a better idea to draw some more so I’m not just tweaking the same pages over and over.

I’d like to render shadows and highlights on each page. The way I’ve done this before is a multiply layer for shadows and a screen layer for highlights. If I decide not to go with it I can just hide those layers and stick with flat coloring. It’s good to have a uniform process I can repeat on every page. The problem with this style is it tends to look flat unless you spend time shaping forms which can be time consuming. There’s also the question of which brush to use. Does simple, flat shading look better? How about a soft airbrush? Should I try a texture? Would a wash brush look out of place if I didn’t add a paper texture underneath? Ultimately it’s whatever helps the look of the comic. Sometimes you need to run a filter on the color layer or change it’s opacity. Other times you lower the saturation or add a halftone. I’ll just play around with it until I decide on something that fits the aesthetic.