Weekly Update - 197 - 12/11/23 (Patreon)

OwO, who dis? Could it be we're finally getting our first glimpse into the secretive world of [REDACTED]? We know almost nothing about these guys after all these years, but after seeing what Kiva can do to the Citadel on a whim, I think they have very reasonable reasons to not want to be discoverable.

Guess I wasn't the only one with complaints about how they moved the Tags to the second page of writing a post. Patreon fixed it! I can number my Weekly Updates again without needing to add extra steps to my workflow! Do you care? Do I? Probably not. I doubt it makes a huge amount of difference in either case! I'm still going to date them I think. Because why not.

Comic this week? Yes. Again, if it kills me, but it shouldn't.  I'd like to get two more comic pages done before the end of this year... but given how the holidays are, and the way that the Wednesdays are lined up, THAT might kill me.

Drawing: Page 181, present for Quinn (soon)

Playing: BG3

Ramble:

Just a short one this time, (lol what even is a "short" ramble?) I want to address how I've sorta fallen off the wagon again posting art on Fridays. I WANT to post bonus art EVERY Friday. That's like, my goal. It used to be just sketches, which were easy and since they didn't cost me much more than an hour or two, it was pretty trivial to squeeze one in every week.  Lately though I've sort of established a precedent for posting actual colored and finished art instead of quick and breezy sketches, which I think people enjoy more anyway. Unfortunately, finished art takes me all day, usually, to finish, sometimes two days, and I don't really feel comfortable diving into one unless The Next Page is already nearly done. The main priority, as always, is posting a comic every Wednesday, as many Wednesdays as I can manage, so if I have to cut a corner somewhere over the course of a week, skipping the Friday post is often an easy way for me to reclaim a day or two.

Couple this with the fact that the regular comic pages have been taking up more and more time lately, because there's this sort of ebb and flow to growing my skills, and I'm on the "ebb" part of that right now. (Or maybe this is the "flow" depending on your perspective.) Yeah maybe it's a confusing metaphor without extra context, so LEMME 'SPLAIN:

What I mean is that as I learn new techniques, styles, or otherwise grow what I know about art, I take more time to experiment and explore these techniques and add more details to my art.  This winds up slowing everything down while I try and implement them on my own pages to my own general satisfaction. Ergo, drawing a single comic panel has been taking more more and more of my time, because I've been spending a lot more time on the sketch, making sure it looks right, really trying to nail the poses, trying to spend more time on the backgrounds, making sure they are at minimum better than my previous backgrounds, and paying a lot more attention to the lighting, which is now a significant point of focus for me, when it used to be just an afterthought. I've been learning a lot lately, watching a lot of tutorial videos and really examining the art from some of my favorite artists with a fine-toothed eye. (ew.)

The opposite side (the flow [or ebb, depending on your perspective]) of this is to REFINE these techniques. Once I'm more comfortable with them, it's a process of figuring out how to achieve the same levels of quality a little bit faster. Developing muscle memory, identifying shortcuts, making techniques into habits, throwing out the methods I don't like or that I don't feel really fits into my style or workflow.  That's what I've been doing, I feel, for most of this past year. Not really improving in quality, necessarily, but slowly getting more comfortable with my style and more consistent and faster at drawing each character and face and page. This part will come around again. Many months down the road perhaps.

Anyway, just wanted to mention it a bit because it's actually been kinda fun for me to slow down and focus on specific things, even things I feel like most people probably wouldn't notice. But I'm certain some of you might notice me slowing down or being apparently less consistent than normal. Outwardly, I worry that it might appear as if I'm losing steam, but it's in fact, the opposite. I'm super excited for how these new pages are turning out! I dunno! Maybe my worries are unfounded. Perhaps this ramble is a pointless waste of my time. Those things are often the case. Thanks for reading!