I used a reference to draw this picture of a fabulous Mexican circus. Clip Studio Paint EX helped me draw the yellow and red bands quickly with the Lasso Fill tool.
The more I use Clip Studio Paint, the more I appreciate the tools designed for drawing comics. Even after drawing three books with CSP, I’m aware of only 10% of CSP’s features. I enjoy fiddling with other painting programs, but when I have a deadline, I reach for CSP.
A quiet day, just chores, just walking, just trying to get my laptop set up for doing comix. That laptop is 8-years old, hardly used, and has a 17-inch screen. It’s a Samsung 7 Chronos that I bought when I was desperate to have a 17-inch laptop. It looked great in the store, but when I got it home, I hated the keyboard, and the machine would only support two external monitors…and I was using three for work. A few months later, I bought a Thinkpad that would do everything I needed. The Samsung has been sitting in a box for seven years, until now. I’m going to install Ubuntu on it and use it as a dedicated art work station.
Other than that bit of first-world frustration, it’s been a good day.
No art going on today. All of my time went into my day job. That’s not a bad thing — what I’m doing is cool and I enjoy aspects of it. What I’ve noticed is that challenging technical tasks re-energize my lifelong interest in solving complex problems.
I was one of those kids who got a chemistry set for Christmas and made rocket propellant. I was a builder — hi-fi amplifiers, loudspeakers, computers, and guitars. I’ve never been bored when I’m on my own time. However, when I’m working on someone else’s dream project, my enthusiasm for doing begins to wane. What works for me is to do short-term contracts, and spend my off-contract time working on my own projects in the hope that they will generate enough income that I no longer have to compromise.
In the past I spent years writing novels and short stories. I became a photographer and sold pictures to the local newspaper, but photos lost their fascination and I wanted to be more expressive — that meant drawing and painting. At the moment, I’m madly in love with the idea of marrying my drawings and writing into children’s book and serious comix.
In December I’ll be an unencumbered artist once again and I will revel in that.
Were it not for life threatening air pollution, the Alfresco Art Club might have actually gone outside today. Instead we decided to relax and have some fun. My idea of fun was to try to install Linux on one of the eight hard drives in my system, but that became boring after a while and I decided to learn more about Krita.
One of the problems with Krita is that it pretty much ignores Photoshop keyboard commands. What’s with using the Ctl key to select colors? Every other drawing program in the universe uses the Alt key.This annoys me. I suppose that giving the BIg Giant the cold shoulder might be satisfying in some way, but if Krita had a smoother learning curve, it would have more users. Despite the little things I find annoying, it’s Krita is awesome in many ways.
Sophie Campbell is one of my favorite artists. Besides Wet Moon, she draws the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Painted with Krita, the eyes corrected, as well as possible, in Photoshop. I couldn’t figure out how to use Krita’s selection tools. Too bad Photoshop can’t use Krita brushes.
Today started with our usual walk. We (my partner, Willy, Nacho, and myself), head up the steep street that goes up to the ridge of the mountain behind our house. From there we can see the top of Mt. Ashland and to the north, the Rogue Valley. If we look South we can see California only 20 miles away. When we return I make myself a gigantic chocolate kale banana smoothy that fills the 64-ounce Vitamix container. It’s awesome.
I’m enjoying pencil and paper, at least for the past week. I’m trying to evolve a simple style that I can use for one-cell cartoons. I’m thinking of just a line drawing with a single sentence beneath it, like all of those New Yorker cartoons, and Gary Larson’s The Far Side. Those cartoons are perfection, imitated but never surpassed.
Doodle using my custom Photoshop colored pencil brush
Lately I’ve been thinking about how I want to spend my “art” time. I’m currently working on a six-part series of children’s picture book about the adventures of Jimmy Jay. It’s been a long trudge uphill. It took me a year to do the first book and nine months to do the second. I had a clear idea for my third book and I was confident that I’d be able to finish it in three months. That three-month deadline passed two months ago.
My assumption that I could complete the book in three months hinged on one thing — that I wouldn’t be working at my real world job. But, shit happens, and they needed me. And, the money was good. So I took the job thinking that I would be able to put in a full day’s work for the company, and then pivot to working on my book after hours. Despite my optimism, it didn’t happen that way. After 8 hours of hacking code five days a week, my brain was fried. I had less than an hour each day to work on my book, and it takes me that long, on a good day, to warm up my art muscles.
So, the book fell behind and worse, the quality of my drawing fell off. I realized that working at a full-time job would mean that book three would also take a year to complete.
All of these events got me to thinking that I may never make a living doing comix and children’s books. If that’s the case, I might as well just work on something that I’ve been putting aside for many years. That something is my chaotic life living in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district the year before the Summer of Love turned San Francisco upside down. It’s a bewildering story that I never imagined would happen to me. But, it did. I
I’ll see how I feel about all of this when I recover from my physical injuries, which are contributing to the deep philosophizing I’ve been doing for the last few days.
I’m dissatisfied with my previous version of page 19. The idea for that picture was to show how tall the moai were. The kids were looking upwards as if they were looking at a skyscraper, but the perspective wasn’t convincing. So, I decided to draw from an overhead perspective. So far, I’ve got this rough sketch of a moai toppled onto his back, eyes closed, dreaming of better days. It’s hard to tell how large he is. The next time I have a chance to work on this picture I’ll draw the kids standing on top of him as they try to get a better view of the island.
Dylan Dolphin is introducing Jimmy Jay and Betty Burro to Easter Island (p. 17)
Yesterday’s version of Dylan Dolphin was a little too scary. The head-on front view of a dolphin with its mouth open makes you want to take a step back from all of those teeth. Even though I think of dolphins as benign animals, they do have formidable jaws. But wouldn’t it be great to have a nightmarish-looking beast who turn out to be a beautiful friend?
