Another quickie, just to draw something. I'm very much enjoying the watercolor brush style for this. I think there are some areas/moments that it works especially well, like the underside of his hand and in some of the folds of the hoodie. That being said, I'm not exactly reaching too far, subject-wise. But that's ok. I made something and that's important. 

Drawtober 14, a quick Silas sketch that feels sort of like an album cover. I am really learning to enjoy these new watercolor brushes. What's been fun is trying to keep them as big and as loose as possible, adding layers of smaller details as I go along, but never trying to be too careful. Should try something else besides the crow.

And done. A very imperfect photo because of glare and terrible lighting. That being said, this was fun to do and since all the planning was done ahead of time, not too hard to do. There was some learning to be done here; being less picky about the sketched lines and being more willing to improvise are the two biggest things I need to get over. It's big enough, about 20x30 or so. I think it has presence and that I managed to keep that intensity and slight sadness from the original photo. Wasn't sure there was going to be a big difference between a full sized print and paint, but of course there is. Digital is easier but is its own thing. I'm kind of torn; I like both. 

 Working on another experiment. I wondered what it would be like if I took one of my 'torn paper' style portraits and made it in actual paint. Up close, it falls apart as there's so little detail, one just ends up looking at the brushstrokes and mistakes. Take a few steps back and it does exactly what I want it to do. It's not finished; have to go back over some areas for another coat. I think I'll end up liking it.

I'm working on a painting, one that will actually get finished and so haven't been doing the Drawtober thing. I've also done a few drawtober sketches that I didn't like enough to post. But today, while waiting for paint to dry, I had time so did this. Something I have to remember for Act 2 of City Silent is to keep up with both movement and distortion as I think it really adds things to the images. Also wanted to try out Procreate's new halftone filter. I like it a lot but also think its something that could be overused very easily. 

One of these will look familiar. I'm part of a three-person collective web comic. These are my contribution. Since the first drawing was kind of perfect for what was supposed to come next, I just redid the word balloon and uploaded it. The second one I drew tonight, allowing a couple of my portraits to make little cameos. Trying to keep the style loose and am surprisingly enjoying the watercolor brushes in Procreate that I bought recently. 

Drawtober day 5. Sort of. Worked all day and had a podcast meeting last night so no drawing yesterday. So I managed an extra one for today to fill the space. Procreate over pencil. 

Drawtober day 6. Sometimes I save screenshots or images from the net of people I think I might want to draw later. This is one of those. I think he's from a Poirot mystery but I'm not sure. Regardless, I loved his look of disapproval and uniform. Glad I grabbed him as he was a good prompt for today. Procreate over pencil.

Drawtober day four. I generally don't use watercolor and up til now, haven't found a digital brush I like. Now I have. This one works pretty well, even as an eraser. A bit warped, with plenty of bed head, this was at least fun to do and I didn't struggle with it.

Drawtober 2. Today I did a pencil drawing I liked well enough but after three attempts at inking, I don't have one I liked. But at least I did draw something. 

 

Inktober. It's a thing and each year, I think about doing something for it and each year, I do less and less. This year, I did pull out brushes and ink but the attempt left me flat. I might have actually lost my touch for it, which is a shame. On the other hand, I can do so much more and get so much better results on the iPad, I don't know if I mind so much. The top image is a pencil drawing of young Greg Brady. I took a photo of it and inked it with a few new ink brushes I got from a nice, big, fat mega-pack. This guy starts off with tons of brushes and you get free updates for life (https://www.georgbrush.club). One of the updates was a whole folder of Japanese ink brushes. So I inked Greg a few times with different brushes then took on one of my recent Silas drawings with another. And they are all a lot better than what I did by hand today. So...ink's not dead, but I'm far more productive with this tool.

Felt like sketching the elf yesterday, so I did. The one thing that makes me happy, after all these years, is that I have finally learned to loosen up when drawing. It's been the one stylistic challenge I've had forever. And I'm letting details be way out of proportion if that's how it goes. Here, his hands are gigantic and yet I like them. Since I'm only making this for me, I have that option. Also, this sketch shows a good deal of the under-scaffolding so, if one cared, they could see how I got here. Just pencil and paper.

More or less, the first 84 pages. I think it's really interesting to see the pages this small, where you can only guess what's in them. The colors almost look mapped. And I honestly thought I'd overused that night time dim copper color but I don't think I have. The next act will be more colorful, I think. I've been slow at this but I've learned a lot and have rediscovered a love of drawing. So here's hoping for Act 2.

Final redraws for this sequence. Most of these were not total reworking, but used elements from when I did the pages 2 years ago. One saw the elimination of the character, one was started from scratch and one had some minor color tweaks and text replacement. All in all not too bad and the track holds together much better than it did before. As I get older, the figure becomes more and more fun to draw as well as distort. I wonder how nutty the second act will look... 

A couple more. The bottom one is kind of a mess, and also feels a lot like graffiti in a way that a lot of the other pages don't. So I think it works. Just a couple more to go. My goal is to get this done this week and the whole act finished and uploaded.

 Two more re-draws for the day....

Today I began the task of going back and re-drawing some pages for the first act. In general, I'm happy or happy enough with the pages to mostly leave them be. There's one section, though, that I kind of hate. It feels stiff and uninteresting. I'll still leave the final pages mostly as-is, but the first 3/4 really just need help. For example, I decided that since this is the last time we see the spirit of the city, it might make sense for the POV to be from above, as if the spirit is looking down. Makes even more sense when we see the spirit descend at the end of the song. Didn't occur to me at the time. So on the top, we have the re-drawn page and below it, the problematic original. I have NO idea what the hell was in my head with that color scheme other than I wanted that high crime light organ, but was worried the comic was feeling a little too one-note palette-wise. Since the final pages have that palette at least for the background, I had to keep that. Otherwise, I threw the rest of the colors out. 

Messing about some more with this. The initial aesthetic, the smoother one has gone by the wayside again. Why? Because this style is FUN. I can keep things loose, I feel almost like an actual cartoonist and making the drawings on my iPad or the sketchpad work out about the same. We're supposedly doing these things in black and white, some with photo backgrounds, some without. One spot color per artist. I got blue which is more than good with me. Did a bunch more drawings but this was the only one finished as I assume we want it. I'm pretty happy with it.

More diversions

 

So... remember that part where I gave up cartooning? Yah. So, some guys I was doing an online comic with a few years ago suddenly popped up wanting to restart said comic again. And suddenly I'm trying to find myself an avatar so I can join in. The comic was called, "The Party Line," and is really just about three cartoonists talking about... whatever. Art, cartooning, life. That's it. Just some blokes talking and cartooning about it. Even the first time around, I could NOT stay with one style, partially because I never felt that I was doing that well with any of them. We haven't even started and already I'm doing the same thing. They're showing in reverse order; the lower ones I was working on, feeling I was finally coming to something that was pretty well conceived. And then I was shown the work of this cartoonist named Boulet, who is a lot rougher and more emotional. And so of course I wanted to try that. And now...well, there you go. Makes me miss real ink as well. No idea how this is going to go, but if I can make a mess of it, I certainly will.

Finished the track today. 20 pages, which might be the longest track in the comic so far. I think laying it out and making it this way really helped. I'll have to go back and read but it feels like there's a cohesion that might be lacking elsewhere. Next step is to redraw whatever pages in Act 1 that need to be redrawn and release the whole act as one package. And then I have to learn how the hell Silas is going to paint as well as how to fake real graffiti for act 2. Ah, well. 

Another page. This one was a bit of a challenge as I wanted to have 4 'panels' in this one to get him OUT of the alley. Managed to make them fit and also draw the figures distorted without using warp features of Procreate nearly as much. It's actually a lot of fun to draw that way. I will likely do more. I can already tell this comic's styles are going to be all over the place. 

Another day, another page. You really have to click on this to see but that's because there are so many, the thumbnails have to get smaller.

 

Another page today. I was almost stuck on this; it's the last verse-pair of the song and I wasn't sure where to go. And then, suddenly, there it was. I pair the next page, which is silent, do a page for the refrain and have one more silent page to end song and act. THEN the re-drawing starts. 

 Thanks to Vince, I made some simple but necessary changes to that page. I put the bricks and image into perspective and added a red 'shadow' from the previous page. While it doesn't add a lot of drama, it adds enough that now the page looks more like a part of the set and it does what I need it to do.

Another few days, another few pages. I actually got three done today which is nuts. Sometimes, stuff just flows. So when that happens, I try and grab as tightly as I can and just go with it. I think there's a lot of movement in this one except for that one panel of the graffiti. I'm not totally sold on that one yet, but it is kind of exactly what I need at the same time. I think it's just that it's so static compared to the rest of the pages. Making the 'chapter' this way allows for tweaks along the way before the whole thing's released so I'll likely look at it again before done. One more page of verse and one of refrain, possibly one walk-off page to end the song and the act and I've reached a pretty big milestone, especially for a project I had pretty much written off. I've done 82 pages of it so far and we're not a quarter of the way through. I'd like to think that this track, most of all, actually feels somewhat musical. We'll see. 

And now for something completely different. I've been thinking about finally selling some of my old Japanese toys. As much as I love them for their design and fun, they're mostly sitting in a cabinet where I can't even see them. This tells me that it's time that they went to someone else. They also might be able to fund other things, possibly other toys. I made a quick and dirty set-up for this: just a piece of bent drawing board and the lights I used for my old Movie Wrench episodes. What amazed me was how close I could get with my phone and get not only some really good focus but, in some cases, some good bokeh as well. Now all I have to do is work up the courage to actually offer them up for sale.

 

Another page down. It's going to be a long song. We're 2/3 the way through. 

 

Two more pages in this sequence down. Lots of curves. It's almost too bad that they won't be seen this way except on  my Flickr site.

It's killing me not to post this series, but it's not like I get a lot of feedback anyway. Finished another page today and did some adjustments on previous pages to get composition tighter. I really think this is the strongest track of the comic so far and I've been having a lot of fun warping and distorting the figures. My camera seems to do some of it on its own. The more I LOOK at photography, the more I realize that even phone lenses distort like crazy. So, in a way, these aren't distorted, they're realistic because we're used to looking at distorted reality and we don't even know it. Or something. Regardless, though no one will ever see these pages in this configuration, there seems to be a lot more movement and flow than usual. I'll try to keep doing that.

I have been working on stuff but I've changed the process around a little. Since getting a second monitor, I've found that I can much better compose the comic's "tracks" as a whole, not just single pages. Sure, the pros thumbnail out everything but that just makes the repetition more boring for me. Likely, I'm wrong but there you go. So I am still working on this, just not posting as I go along. I'll likely put it up when this track is done. I'm about a third of the way through.

Penciling is still a thing here and there. Two of the figures of these six pages are penciled, the rest are just digital. Somehow, I tend to be looser in pencil. Either way, it's drawing and that nearly always feels good.