Update (Patreon)

About Always Human - book 1 seems to be selling pretty well and everyone seems very happy, so I think there's a pretty good chance that season 2 will also get to be printed :)

Decisions in publishing can take a very long time to be fully sorted out, so I don't know how long it will be before a decision is officially made (and even then I don't know how long it will be before I'm allowed to talk about it if/when a decision is made) so uh... yep. Could be a while! But I have hope :)

About Flowers & Fangs

(Please don't talk about this off Patreon)

The webtoon editorial team liked the most recent iteration of the pitch, and want to move forward with it, so, yay :D

(Technically nothing's set in stone until contracts are signed, so I'm trying not to get too excited just in case the situation changes, and I'm not going to talk about it publicly until after signing. I expect this to take a while to happen. Contracts always take forever, even in the best of circumstances, and webtoons had been planning on hiring new staff right before the shutdown, but that didn't happen, and now everyone's overwhelmed.)

To people who pledged to the cameo tier during Aerial Magic's run - I will wait until the contract is signed before getting in touch with you about a F&F cameo. Just want to make sure everything's certain first!

What I have been doing -

I have two goals for comic art moving forward

1) I want to work smarter, not harder. For me, the main purpose of art is to tell a story, and I'm trying to open myself up to doing things that feel like 'cheating' but would make the process of visual storytelling faster and easier.

2) I want to get better at drawing people at a variety of angles/in perspective/etc. Being able to draw from different camera angles can add interest/variety/emotion to the art and make for much more compelling storytelling. Not being able to do this limits me.

So I've been spending a lot of time exploring Clip Studio Paint's 3D models, in the hope of using them to draw people faster and better.

I started by focusing on drawing heads at different angles because, frankly, I'm bad at this. I'll sketch thumbnails with heads at a bunch of different angles and then by the time I'm done inking they almost always morph into the same default 3/4 angle I find easiest to draw ^^;

I found this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBq4aN-7CXI&t=350s

and used it to experiment with drawing features on a blank face, so that I can have a head drawn in my style that I can rotate to different angles.

A drawing that looks like this:

Maps onto a face so that the 3D model looks like this:

And then to the left I drew using the reference.

You can see that I didn't stick to it very strictly - CSP modeller doesn't allow for much flexibility in what faces look like, and also I know that having that much empty space between the eye and the ear might be technically correct but I like stretching the eye out into that empty space because eyes are expressive and empty spaces aren't.

But even with my tendency to wilfully ignore the model, this is a much better angle than I usually manage when trying for a "nearly profile but both eyes in view" and I could also draw this very quickly, so I'm happy :)

Another thing I want to improve on is drawing bodies in perspective, drawing complicated poses, etc. Photo references help with this a lot, but can be hard to find/create so I wanted to see what I could do with the body models in CSP.

The creator of the manga Gantz regularly uses models for both characters and 3D backgrounds, and then draws directly over the 3D models. 

https://youtu.be/resyfrrNIlE?t=40 (this is now the second link to this same youtube channel - they're an excellent resources for using the 3D models in CSP to create comics!)

I've been aware of this for a while (and I know some webcomic artists do this too) but it felt like cheating (even if drawing on top of models saves time, it felt wrong, what if I regress as an artist?)

However, I reassessed my thoughts on this mostly because of how much better I am now at drawing backgrounds after spending so much time tracing models for the backgrounds in Aerial Magic :) I definitely haven't regressed, I feel like I've dramatically improved - rotating the models in 3D helped me develop my sense space, drawing over models helped me get a sense of how the 3D displays in 2D, and now I can pretty confidently launch into drawing built environments without any sort of reference (though of course I will still do much better with references).

So since my goal is to work smarter not harder, I decided to see what the experience of drawing directly over models is like.

My concerns: I know that models aren't necessarily going to be anatomically accurate, especially in the joints, so I want to make sure I can adapt around this.  I want to make sure that drawing over models doesn't make my art stiff. And I want to see how long it takes to drag models into the poses I want, because the goal is to save time.

Going into this I knew that CSP has a great tool for customising body types for their 3D models and I was hoping to incorporate this with the face I drew above, so that I had customised bodies with a drawing mapped onto the face.

Unfortunately I can't do this! I have to work with two separate models, one for the face, one for the body, and then just copy the face onto the body. It's a pity that I can't do them both together.

So here's attempt 1:

I used one of CSP's default poses (walking carrying a book) then copied the face on top, then sketched some clothes and snakes/hair very loosely on top of it.

I then inked directly on top of this - which saved a lot of time - and I was pretty happy with this as a first attempt.

Attempt 2:

I played around a lot more with the proportions here. CSP lends itself to cute anime girls but I want Tess to be long and gangly, and I don't want her face to be quite that cutesy, so I tried a different face mapping for her.

I am still very happy with how this is turning out! I'm saving so much time in the sketch-to-ink stage!! 

(This is a default CSP pose - I haven't yet experimented with how much time it takes to craft a pose from scratch)

Here's the face I drew to map onto the 3D model:

(lol, horrifying!)

Attempt 3

I wanted to test out a post that would interact with the environment (also a 3D model) and I also wanted to actually customise the pose, rather than using a default pose.

(I did start with a default pose - someone sitting at a desk - but then moved the limbs around to get what I wanted, and it was it was a bit of disaster at first and Mira's foot is clipping through her knee, but this is something I hope to get better and faster at with practice ha ha and at least I can draw around mistakes ^^;)

Attempt 4

Since my original goal with 3D models was poses in perspective, I took one of the default running poses, modified it a bit, and then viewed it from the top down. I think this turned out okay?? Definitely not perfect but also definitely not something I'd be able to do without a reference, so yay :) And I do think having a 3D model (rather than a photo) gives me a much better sense of how the 3D-ness of the pose actually works, which is also yay.

I'm going to keep on practicing manipulating 3D models and drawing on top of them, and I think this should be a good way to work smarter not harder :)

(That said manipulating them is super fiddly and I suspect that it won't work well for scenes where characters are interacting, so I'll be drawing those from scratch rather than from model.)

Here are the final face and body models I ended up with for Tess and Mira (who is posed for wearing heels)

They're not perfect and I will probably keep on tweaking them as I experiment (and I'm working within the constraints of CSP) but I think they'll be very helpful :)

Ending this with some cat sketches, because Tess has a cat, which means I need to learn how to draw cats properly ^^;