June 4th, 2023 (Patreon)

"What's on the menu for this month?"  Great question.  My goal for this month is practice and experimentation - specifically towards a shading style & method that complements the rougher, looser, sketch work I've done in recent months.  Whether I'll arrive at something I'm happy with, I don't know, but now is a good time to explore it.

What will I use for this practice?  I'm not entirely sure.  I collaged together a bunch of unfinished things, stuff I want to work on - not all of them are suitable for what I have in mind.  Like the Seff and Luna hunting pic would look really great when it's finished, but I'd hate to use it for an awkward first attempt at a new shading technique.  Maybe what I use for that practice isn't even on this page, I don't know.  But putting this collage together helped me figure out and decide what I'd like to do, and that's work toward making my less-finished stuff look better/more finished without putting in the time and effort for what I generally class as 'finished.'  I want to find a middle ground that results in a higher quantity of decent pics.

I did start last night on the next pose in that set of sketches with Kimber.  I may knock out another sketch or two from the vast backlog of thumbnails and unfinished things, before I settle on what I'm doing.  I might try shading them, but probably not.  I'm... very tempted to tackle that Seff/Jen/Ash set or one of the polaroid sets, or possibly even the Seff/Ash comic.  When it came to the sketches of Winter (and you guys) this past December, I think I averaged about 2 days of work for each sketch.  If I can maintain that tempo then some kind of pic series isn't out of the question.

That leads me to a bit of a post-mortem on SSU.  I tried some things on it that, ultimately, I don't think worked out.  First was trying to split time between the comic and keeping up with requests here.  Both suffered for it, I did not have the time and effort to keep up with them both.  Second was trying to assembly line the comic, tackling one stage at a time - thumbnail the whole thing out, sketch every page, ink every page, color every page, shade every page.  Thumbnailing the whole thing out, having a good roadmap, that's just common sense.  The rest of it?  After sketching all pages I started finishing them individually - each page often needed some redrawing to a greater or lesser extent, whether it was fixing Makwa's hair to make it look more wet or completely throwing out and redoing half a page's panels.  This might've made the comic better in the end, but I also think this process slowed production down more than it was worth.