Allowing myself to make bad drawings.

Hi all!

I'm a bit behind in my comic work (not by much, but I don't want it to snowball), so please forgive the tardiness of this newsletter.

I have been frantically penciling away on my comic and have completed roughly 17 pages of pencils. It's something to be proud of, for sure, but it's definitely presented it's own set of challenges.

Getting used to a digital only process.

Unlike my other comics I've made, which were all on physical bristol (mostly 18x24" pages, though Preying Mantis was 14x17"), I decided to make the switch to all digital this time. Partly for my process, and partially as a time-saver (no need to scan and piece pages together). A lot of this is beneficial for me as I like to "unearth" my pencils.

It was a bit of a process to get used to at first. There's something about the feel of your tools that can affect how you draw (mostly in a mental way, throwing you off your game). While a lot of the skills you have in traditional art will transfer to digital, there's a period of adjustment to working digitally. The feedback to your hand is different, the tool functions a little differently. It took awhile for me to adjust to digital inking, and so it took a while to get used to digital penciling for a comic, and to find a digital pencil I liked working with (for the record, it's these pencils which are free).

But there are plenty of benefits to be had with digital. I start with a very rough drawing and work in layers adding a little more detail each time. It's likely a time wasting way of penciling for a lot of people, but it's just what works for me. On physical paper this gets messy fast. In digital, slap on a new layer and lower the opacity of the old one, and delete older layers as you go.

Working with digital also allows me to easily shift and scale drawings to see what different crops might look like, and save a bit of time that would otherwise be spent re-drawing.

Allowing myself to make bad drawings.

One of the largest things I had to overcome was my internal sense of perfectionism. I wanted every panel and page to be perfect. Which is asking a lot when you're on an ambitious timeline, on top of having a day job and suffering extreme fatigue (more on that in another newsletter maybe). They way I got around this was by giving myself permission to make bad drawings.

And letting go of ideals

In college, I remember having very loose pencils and then inking over those. A prof finally called me out on it, telling me "you know, you make really loose pencil drawings, hoping that your ink strokes will fix it--but they don't". It was an honest critique from a very well-known comics industry creator that I took to heart and it resulted in me slowly working towards tightening up my pencils (a process I still work on to this day). However, for this project, I have to let go of a certain amount of that if I want to meet my tight deadline. Finishing a project is often a careful balancing between the ideals of what you want to be doing, and what you actually can do.

One of the less-than-ideal things right now is I work straight from the thumbnails, blowing them up and then roughing over them. Time allowing, I'd make some layouts/roughs first, try out alternate "shots" for panels, and then spend more time fleshing out the pencils. I'd produce one beautiful page every couple of weeks, I convince myself. And maybe that's true, but very likely I wouldn't. Or I would but it would take me years to finish, and that's not what I want for myself.

In this video here, you can see a bit of my process (pencils not quite finished here, but you get the picture):

• I blow up a thumbnail.

• I lay out the text first to make sure it’s given room and consideration on the page.

• In this instance, I decide to rework the page and sketch out some quick and dirty small thumbnails.

• I rough the pencil, and then refine.

Other Art

Finally, I've continued doing some little fanart pieces to keep me practicing colouring. Here's another Gale piece I did and an Aragorn piece. The Gale piece got nearly no attention compared to my Sargent-esque one, which was a little disappointing. I get it though. It's not as exciting on the surface because there's not as much going on in the environment or posing, but I feel like I really improved in simplifying colours, especially on the face. Aragorn got some love on tiktok at least! Either way, I'm relatively happy with the outcomes, as I feel like I'm nailing down a bit more of a flow for colouring for me. There's still more work to be done in my rendering of folds and shadows, but baby steps!!!

Recommendations

• ✏️ The PSKI pencil set for procreate if you draw on iPad!

• 🎮 Any card game nerds here? Netrunner is a game near and dear to my heart, initially designed by Richard Garfield (designer of Magic the Gathering). It’s now spearheaded by a not-for-profit org of volunteers who love the game. Print some cards free or buy them from Null Signal Games.

• 📚 Book-wise, I finally found a used bookshop (thanks Powell’s!!) that had the weta workshop Hobbit books for not a ridiculous price. While the movies structurally are a mess, the design is gorgeous.

• 📚 I’ve also really enjoyed diving into the Castlevania art of the tv series book.

Talk soon!

Believe it or not I’ve already got more to write and share, so expect me back in a couple weeks!