Just enough time to open Clip Studio Paint for a few minutes
/
More layoffs coming at my day job. The layoffs go like this. No full-timers are laid off before all the part-timers are laid off. This is nothing new — these have always been the rules since forever. But there have never been layoffs before. Fortunately, I have a plan B, which is to replace my part-time job income with the income I earn from selling books. Oh! Did I mention that I had $13.97 in sales over the last 12 months. I’m going to have to elevate my game.
Page 19 with a Sleeping Moai, a Dolphin, a Burro, and a Blue Jay
/It’s page 19 again! Today I clocked out of work at 4 p.m. and had time to add the kids to the picture. The general idea is that they’re standings on a sleeping moai. You’ll have to read the book to know why all of the moai, except one, are actually living creatures who happen to be asleep. It’s marvelously complicated!
Concept Sketch: Dylan Dolphin for Book 3 of the Adventures of Jimmy Jay
/This is half-finished sketch of Dylan Dolphin. I had about an hour to work on my book today, and this is what I came up with. Believe it or not, Dylan is supposed to be a cute kid dolphin, but he looks like a dangerous bruiser. I think I’ll keep him that way. If I’m going to write these books, I might as well write a book that I would want to read.
Look at those teeth! Some varieties of dolphins have up to 250 of them. However, bottlenose dolphins have about 50. Still, that’s an intimidating grin. I like it.
Same page as yesterday, but cleaned up
/
This page is close to finished. In fact, it may be good enough. Instead of tweaking it endlessly, I’m going to move on to the next page, and then the next, and come back to this one sometime in the future.
My big concern now is that I must keep moving forward while I’m working at a short-term, high pressure job that can be extraordinarily draining. Next week will begin with a 50 detailed reports that I have to edit and correct. Then I prepare for the next week, and so on for the next two months. The challenge is to preserve enough cognitive energy to work on this book for a couple of hours each night. So far, so good.
My process for this image: draw in Photoshop, paint and letter in Clip Studio Paint.
Yet Another Dolphin Concept Sketch
/
I worked late again at my outside job, until 6:30 pm. My aim is always to clock out a 4 pm and then get back to working on my book. It doesn’t always work out that way.
As for my book, I had about one hour to work on it, so I sketched a scene showing the dolphin character, who has magically turned into a little boy dolphin named Dylan, talking with Jimmy and Betty after pulling them out of the water.
Another Anthropomorphic Dolphin
/The challenge for drawing dolphins with human bodies is that dolphins don’t have a neck. If I try to draw a girl with a girlish neck and draw a thin neck, she looks like a bird. However, the if I give the character a thick neck, it looks okay if the dolphin is a muscular guy. The question is, do I want a muscular guy in a kids book?
Tomorrow I’ll try to make this guy into a chubby kid.
I had to work overtime today at my part-time job.
Trying to Draw an Anthropomorphic Dolphin
/
Book three’s new character is a bottle nosed dolphin named Dolly. She’ll be Jimmy Jay’s companion in book four.
Dolphins are beautiful animals, and they’re hard to draw. The center dolphin looks right because it’s a tracing. The others are all mine. My goal is to create a cute young dolphin, but those I drew look matronly, and, with their skinny necks, like dinosaurs or ostriches.
