It’s actually a little hard for me to remember and think about what has happened in art for the past month to be honest. More ramblings ahead!

I suppose getting back into the full-swing of weekly drawings has been a little slow. I haven’t been happy with a few of the drawings for one reason or another. One such reason is that I’m not really satisfied with the line art with some of them, because I realize now that I went back to my bad habit of trying to carve in the lines again. There’s a reason why I labeled my brush as “Use me gently” but I guess that reminder just wasn’t good enough. I tend to “carve in the lines” when I’m not sure how something is supposed to look, so I over compensate by going “THIS IS HOW IT LOOKS GRRRRRR.” I’m sure I’ve repeated this fact at least 2 or 8 times by now, heh. Thankfully, I have some older pieces of art that I can look back on and remind myself of how I actually wanted something to look. The answer, as it has always been, is quick and gentle. It seems as though that my current “style” adheres better to a more vague and softer line art, as opposed to those smooth inked lines you might see in mangas or cartoons. Anytime I try to do those types of lines, it exaggerates the mistakes I’ve made in the anatomy, or that I’ve simply done the line incorrectly. I’m too imprecise with that kind of style, so will simply no longer try it. I’ve completely dumped the idea of hard line art, as mentioned before I’m sure. I’ve recently had the pleasure of putting the “NEW” line art to the test with a newer character sheet commission. I think it went pretty well, minus a few parts. I don’t want to go into what I think was terrible too much, but I can at least say that it was a learning experience in the end, in a good way.

Recently in the past week I’ve found it kind of fun to draw “in my own time” now. Maybe now I can post more than just a few commission pieces, like comic work!

“Oh here we go with the [comic] stuff again, after months of literally 0 progress, let’s see what he has to say now.” BACKGROUNDS. I don’t know how I want to do the backgrounds. It’s something that has me stumped and I flat out don’t want to tackle it. Back when I was working on the first iteration of Eyes on the Prize I did all the line art and coloring as I would a regular character. This really sucked for multiple reasons. For one thing, it was hard to keep things consistent and interesting. A “royal” bedroom is interesting because of all the wealth in the room, the details in the bed, and the gifts near the desk, etc etc. One problem with all that though, especially with how I did things before, is doing the line art for every single item in frame, flatting every single item in frame, and then SHADING every single item in frame was hitting the edges of Procreate’s layer limit. So, having vague and limited knowledge of how to even do backgrounds, couples with a massive amount of things to even draw, plus the limitation of workspace spelled out a very frustrating experience in the end. I’m remembering the frustration and I’m avoiding it.

Though, with that said, I do have a few ideas working in mind. I’m deciding to pick and work on literally one piece at a time. Currently I’m dabbling with stonework textures. Having to do the line art for the entire wall of stone-bricks for 1 tiny room was time consuming and not fun at all. This time I’m going for a more painterly approach. With the small experiments I’ve done so far, it not only seems to be faster, but also a lot more fun. But, there comes the next problem of “How do I get my flat-line art character to fit in with the scene and not look like a cardboard cutout?” which I’m still thinking about to be honest.

Basically, comic making hit a snag because of backgrounds, I want to fix it, but it’ll be slow.

I’ll try to be better about being more gentle with my line art.

I’ll try to GET be GETTING MORE ART DONE. Wew.

Sorry for the jumbled rambleness.