My lovely Edinburgh friend Wendy and I are working through this snowy day, tackling side-by-side the blocks in our personal passion projects.
For me, today was going to be about working on the script for my comic, but the depth and honesty of my conversations with Wendy made me see that the reason I wasn’t working on the story is that I hated the way my drawing looked after the first panel.
She suggested that I practice drawing the characters over and over. So I did, and I slowed down to do better roughs than the too-rough, too-loose ones I’d done for those pages.
I worked on that, and — breakthrough! Now what I see on-screen matches the feel of what I did on paper. This is new territory, and I need practice; I can’t just jump to product.
Wendy and I have also been down in the mines of Clip Studio Paint, the program I use to do all my digital drawing. She’s figured out one quarter of it, I’ve figured out the other (half is still The Realm of Mysteries), so we’re able to geek out about all the specifics, but we’ve also shared gifts of really helpful shortcuts and solutions.
I just dashed out through the snow to the grocery store, and now we’re set to make coffee and tea, put our heads down, hide out, and bash through our projects.