What I Did Today

I got up at 5 this morning planning to work half the day in Harmony and half in Manga Studio.

I say “planning” because as I was finishing breakfast I got a sinus headache which got worse even after taking something for it. I couldn’t concentrate with the ache and the nausea got to the point where I gave up and went back to bed. I’m guessing I’ve got some sort of infection so I’ve been taking what I can to fight it.

This evening I finished a pass at shading for two pages. Some of the panels look good but I’m going to keep working some of them. Then I’ll fiddle with the blending and color so each page works as a whole. I think it’s important in my process right now to not sign off on something just because I finished it that day. If something looks bland the next day when I come back to it, imagine how it’ll look in the archives.

I really want to get back into Harmony, see what’s new in 12.1, and get back into the habit of working with it regularly. I think splitting my work time between comics and animation will help keep me from feeling too burnt out.

Slept in today to rest up and get over whatever happened yesterday. Took it pretty easy during the day and spent the evening rendering. I’m not 100% on the technique I’m using but I seem to be correcting and moving it towards what I want it to look like. I’m doing the shading with the color layer off so I just focus on the values. Then I might move on to playing with the color in each panel to make it work better over all.

Tonight I’m going to bed early to try and get my mornings back. Wish me luck, folks.

Spent the morning fussing with shading. Tried a sharp edge and added some effects to a page. Decided to try another with a different brush and a different approach. Played around with the color of the shade as well as the layer opacity. Fiddled with the opacity of the flats layer, too, which helped things pop a little more. I can see myself tweaking this for awhile until it’s where I want it. I’m probably going to be spending more time than I’d like rendering each page but hopefully the results will be worth it. Still haven’t ruled out coloring line art or painting it out completely, though that flies in the face of trying to get ahead on updates. Of course, if getting updates out as quickly as possible was the top priority I’d be doing straight black and white. Heck, it’d just be strips instead of full pages. There has to be some accounting for quality.

Hope everybody had/is having a great summer vacation. Today was my first day back in the studio after two weeks in San Diego with my mom. Returned to the comics I’d flat-filled hoping to start posting some. Still trying to decide how I want to handle the shading. Didn’t get much time to experiment with it before leaving. The last two days before the trip were kind of a blur of packing and making sure everything was sorted out.

I’m at the point stylistically where I’m trying to decide what works best for the comic. I could leave things flat but I’d like to carve out the forms a little bit. Plus I’m not 100% sure I like the colors I’ve used yet. I can fiddle with their saturation and some correcting layers or even rework them if I feel they need it. Drawing shadows on a multiply layer is kind of bothering me. I need to get better at picking my shade colors or else it just looks like the figure has dirt smeared everywhere. I could use a sharp brush, a soft brush, or something with some texture in it. Or I could forgo a brush entirely and work with gradients or halftones. Some people like to mix different techniques but I like to stay consistent across a piece to hold it together. I also have a habit of running into the issue of mid-tones muddying everything up, washing out the light shades and pushing the darks too far. Then there’s the issue of making the shadows work in black and white but dropping them on color ruins it.

Basically I need to experiment but not make something so elaborate it eats time away from later updates. Usually the best solution comes after spending time trying another approach and realizing the simplicity of doing it another way.

Today was a busy day. I spent the morning in the studio penciling a page and working on the lettering. After lunch Ian and I recorded a podcast before summer break. I started laundry and other things to take care of this weekend. It’s gonna be a busy vacation.

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.