Weekly Update - 156 (Patreon)

It's interesting to me, going through all these old pages as I update them for Volume #1. Each and every page I open up is like a miniature time-capsule from 2018. I open the page, there's 70 or 80 mysterious unnamed layers and who even knows what I drew on any of them? Some are entire panels on their own and some of them are even blank! It's very exciting.

And that's primarily the reason most pages are going to receive minor touchups only. I'll redraw only the panels that are in desperate need of fixing, like Page 3. Thinking like 4-7 panels, off the top of my head, across the whole book. According to the recent poll, both here on Patreon and on Twitter, it seems like most people are okay with that.

I've been thinking of it as a "remaster" for the book, but I don't really know what's enough to qualify as a "remaster" in the minds of my readers. Since I'm going to all this work, it's definitely a feature of the book I want to use in advertising, so I'm tempted to call it a "remaster" officially for marketing purposes, but I don't want people to feel mislead... You guys are my most important readers... what do you think? Can I call it a "Remaster" or is there another term I should use?

This was an abnormal week, though, it continues to snow, continues to try and bury us under the snow, and to make matters worse I fell on the driveway yesterday and broke our snowblower. Suffice it to say why did they make the handle out of cheap plastic? So it was a far less productive week than I had hoped it would be.

I did get an idea for how many pages I might be able to get through in a day, though. Except that they all require different levels of work and so it's very hard to gauge how long each one will take.

I'm hoping to make some more progress on Volume #1 this week, finishing out Chapter 1 and perhaps getting a good head start on Chapter 2.

Drawing: Volume#1 pages

Playing: WoW some more

Reading: Mistborn (still)

Volume 1: 14/72 Pages Remastered

Next Character Sheets: Martin and Michael

Ramble:

Beginning with Page 14, I apparently started using some Photoshop-exclusive features that won't function in Sai, forcing me to reinstall Photoshop and make my touchups there.

Ultimately, these features, although they were admittedly kinda neat, turned out to be useless for me. I'm not sure when I stopped using them, but it seems like I'm stuck with them for the next ten pages at least.

I've complained about it before I think, but Photoshop has a real problem of feature-bloat. It has a million different tools for a million different purposes designed by engineers that are trying to figure out what artists want. Artists are enigmatic to engineers, so their solution seems to be just to try and pack in every possible imaginable feature that might be even the slightest bit of use to anyone. Joke's on them though, even artists don't know what we want!

At the end of the day, a digital art image is a flat matrix of pixels, and no matter what methods I use, my goal is to make the pixels somewhat close to how I feel they should be. As an artist, I want to spend nearly all of my time with pen to tablet, drawing and experimenting, and far, far less time tweaking dials and settings and inputting numbers. That's why I prefer Sai, because it's cheap, it's uncomplicated, it has enough features that make digital art possible, and it lets me spend all my time drawing and not worrying about how to translate complicated maths into the image I want to make.

In other words, if you're in the market for a digital art tool, don't subscribe to Photoshop, just buy Sai for like 15-20 bucks and a tablet and it's all you'll ever need.