Sunday's are for taking naps

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It’s March 10 and I lost an hour of sleep. I hate daylight savings time. Just when my biological clock is feeling comfortable with 6:30 am sunrises, wham! We’re back in the dark. In protest I took a one-hour nap in the little patch of sun that comes through the living room window.

I’m getting a little faster with Sketchbook. I colored two images today and got started on a third. The built-in Copic color palettes save me a ton of time. There’s a nice drag-and-drop custom palette that makes it easy to collect the colors I’m using throughout the book. Nice work, Autodesk.

One other thing I’m noticing as I use my Wacom tablet is that it’s ergonomically more friendly than my Huion pen display. I can sit with good posture with the tablet. There’s no need to lean over the screen as I do with the Huion. That leaning with the raised arms kills my back. Another great feature a tablet has that a pen display does not have: your hand never blocks your view, which happens on the Cintiq and iPad Pro.

Done: I Painted Buddy Convincing Jimmy to Disobey an Order

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I digitally colored an image today using Sketchbook. Hooray! The only reason I was able to finish this is because It’s Saturday and I had a few extra hours. This image took about 4 hours of hair-pulling. That’s just an expression — I don’t have any hair.

My successful strategy was to send the image to iCloud, then download it to Sketchbook on the iPad. Sketchbook exports a PNG file, which is a pain, but it’s workable. There’s probably a simpler way to do all of this, but I’m not in the mood to find it.

This is taking way more time than I anticipated. My concern is that I’ll miss my March 31 deadline. My gift for underestimating how long anything will take is my super power. I’m a cockeyed optimists whose ego keeps telling me “You’re so clever, my boy. You can do anything you put your mind to. You could be an astronaut, if you wanted to. You could play jazz piano like Dave Brubeck, if you wanted to. You could write and illustrate a children’s book in a week, if you wanted to. And you’re a damned handsome fella, too.” Thanks, ego!

Yikes! I haven't finished the first image yet!

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One of the advantages of having zero visitors to this blog is that no one is watching while I screw up. That’s what I’m doing as I’m learning Sketchbook. And I’m screwing up continuously as I’m figuring out how to color my comics. The last thing I need right now is the feeling that spectators are having a laugh as I hack through this project. Anonymity is creative freedom! I’ll make that my motto.

I call the children’s book a “picture book”, but it’s really a form of comic book. Which is okay with me, because I love comic books. I’m about halfway finished with the first image. I’ll add the background colors tomorrow while I’m doing the laundry. Around our house that’s my weekend chore.

Coloring my children's picture book, page one

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After panicking yesterday when I opened Sketchbook and realized that I’d forgotten how to use it, I calmed down and tried it again today. It took 2 hours to get the hang of the interface with it’s color puck and brush puck. By the time my allotted time expired, I felt that everything is going to work out fine.

The first picture in the book was originally painted with watercolor. I re-inked it fairly quickly and then began to color it. Sketchbook has a complete Copic color palette, which I will use. I didn’t get very far, but there is color on the page! I have a gut feeling that I’m heading in the right direction.

Organizing all of the book's drawing

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No drawing today. The time has come to color the images I’ve drawn over the last two months. These are exciting times!

Tomorrow I’ll see if there’s a slick way to use my iPad to color these. If I end up spinning my wheels, I’ll go back to my iMac and use Photoshop.

Here’s a screenshot of the PSD files I’ll be working with. All of these drawings are based on my crude storyboard thumbnails. Thank you, crude storyboard, for your rock-steady guidance9

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Inking the final three images

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Okay. I inked the last three images. Tomorrow I’ll move on to coloring.

Over the last 3 months I’ve observed that my style changes every time I take an online class or watch an amazing artist on Youtube. So, to make my life simpler, I stopped watching Youtube artists and I stopped taking Skillshare classes. I feel feel better now.

These are the last three images in the book.

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Inking the final images, part one

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I inked three of the six final pictures today. As I was splattering away I realized that I have two pictures that pretty much tell the same story (1 and 2 below), which means that I will eventually decide which one goes in the book.

I had time to scan these three images, but not enough time to clean them up. So be it. Tomorrow I’ll airdrop these three into Sketchbook on my iPad and massage them a little.

Here’s a description of my artistic day. I get off work about 5 pm and chill with my family (my partner and our two dogs) until about 6 pm. From there we all go about our evening activities until 7:30 pm. I use those 90 minutes to sketch, draw, ink, scan, and run the drawings through Photoshop. After that I quickly write the daily blog post. I blog using Squarespace. At 8 pm we all gather together again and end our day with another hour of family time. Then to bed at 9 pm or so. It’s a wonderful life.

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Rough sketches for the final pages of my children's picture book

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With only 28 days until my self-imposed deadline for publishing my first children’s picture book, I decided to rough out the remaining images in pencil. Knowing the end is near is a good feeling. The next step will be to ink these sketches as quickly and efficiently as possible. Line ‘em up and mow ‘em down, so to speak.

When I see how simplified my drawings have become, compared to the rendered and colored drawings I drew at the beginning of the project, I’m concerned that my style as of today, Sunday March 3, 2019 is very different from my style in December, 2018 when I started this project. My optimistic takeaway is that I’m learning and improving as I work. The unintended side effect of improving is that my older drawings need to be redrawn to match my current style.

These six sketches are placeholders. After I ink these roughs they will serve as very fuzzy guidelines to aid me as I’m inking like crazy, on a wing and a prayer.

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My Workflow is getting smoother

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Today’s drawing went through these steps:

1. Pencil thumbnail in small sketchbook (done about 2 months ago)

2. Pencil sketch in production sketchbook, done today. The following steps took about one hour.

3. Inked with Rotring Tikky

4. Scanned with Plustek A3 scanner

5. Airdropped to iPad Pro and re-inked in Sketchbook

6. Airdropped to iMac

7. Edited in Photoshop — cleaned up and contrast fixed

8. Exported to iCloud storage as a PNG

9. Uploaded to Squarespace

The most important steps in the process is drawing and inking with pen and paper. Working with real things gets my brain in gear. Digital is for fixing things.

Drawing the Wood-burning Stove Using Autodesk Sketchbook on an iPad

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Today was a little different. I got word at work that we’re being downsized to the point that I probably won’t exist at my job in a couple of years. This puts extra pressure on me to get really good at making high-quality children’s books really fast. As my wife and I pondered our future, we started joking around that there’s ten times more money to be made in writing sexy romance novels than in children’s book. Plus, while listening to the Stress Less Ladies podcast, I learned that lesbian erotica is all the rage these days, and it might be better for me to take on a nom de plume of Sexy Lexy and start cranking out some lit-porn.

It was just a little gallows humor in the face of a career being wiped off the face of the planet. For now I’m honoring my contract and I’m sticking with doing what I originally planned to do: children’s picture books.

Speaking of which, today I scanned in a drawing of a wood-burning stove and inked it with Autodesk Sketchbook on my iPad Pro. It went really smoothly, but what’s missing are my signature wobbly lines and lopsided circles. Those straight lines radiating from the stove are supposed to indicate that something inside the stove is making a helluva racket.