Page 3 Revised

/

It was a big day in Southern Oregon. I had my yearly checkup and I was pronounced healthy. Also, the plumbers replaced the pipesfrom our house to the city’s main line. The house was built in the 50’s, when Orangeburg pipe was commonly used. It has a life span of about 50 years — ours lasted 70. The replacement pipe is PVC, which will last up to 150 years. Long enough, I say.

To complete page 3, I enhanced the colors, added a walrus, and painted the circus tents in the distance.

Under the weather

/

I’m not feeling great today. I haven’t eaten for the last 24 hours. The idea of eating is unthinkable. The cause…I’ve tracked it down to a bad bottle of very expired buffalo sauce.

Despite feeling like shit, I was able to finish page 15, which has been languishing in an incomplete state for over a year. In this picture we see that Jimmy and Betty have been rescued by a mysterious character, a dolphin.

Too Many Backup Locations!

/

When I get paranoid about losing all of my work, I make a backup. My computer has a total of 6 hard drives, not counting iCloud, pCloud, and OneDrive. I have three complete backups for my third Jimmy Jay book. Each one is a snapshot of the book at a particular date. That’s all good…until I start revising my pages in the wrong location.

Today I realized that I had created a new page in one of the backups. Then it occurred to me that I may have created other pages in one of the other backups. I went a little insane and started examining all of the images in all of the backups.

After a couple of hours I found 2 pages that were not in the Real Working Directory. The silver lining to my panic is that I examined the size of every file, looking for signs that a file had been changed.Some of the files are more than 400GB in size. That’s because I use a shit ton of layers. I have to get rid of the unused layers. When a page is finished, there should be one layer for line work, one layer for colors, a layer for texture, one for shadows, and one for the background,

Pages 74 and 75, finished

/

My deadline for finishing the drawings for book 3 is July 31. After that I’ll have three weeks to prepare the text and images for publication. I’ll use InDesign for laying out the pages and creating the PDF for Ingramspark. InDesign is a tough slog. I’ve forgotten everything I know about it. I last worked with it in February of 2021 when I completed my the second book in the fabulous “Adventures of Jimmy Jay” series.

Reviving an old sketch of the Easter Island Volcano Demon

/

I’m going to find a place in the story for this image. The reader needs to know that the volcano demon’s rage is implacable and heartless. Overly dramatic? Oh, how can a fictitious volcano demon be overly dramatic? This beast has turned an entire island’s population, save for one boy, into stone statues.

The story needs a villain and the villain’s redemption, and that’s what it will get.

I'm moving my Clip Studio Paint files to iCloud

/

I’d like to say that Clip Studio Cloud is really great, but it’s not. The upload speed, for me, is 0.05MP/sec, which means that large files, such as my 250MB pages with 70 layers, will never sync in my lifetime.

I wanted to use the CSP cloud so I could use Clip Studio Paint Ex on my iPad up to work on my book files. It seemed like the obvious thing to do, but what’s the point of having 100GB of storage when you don’t get the bandwidth necessary to move large image files.

My solution was to give up on the Clip Studio Cloud and put my 22GB of book files into the my iCloud account. Within an hour all of my files were shareable on my iPad. Problem solved.

Dreading Page 28 -- The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost

/

Every time I see page 28 I cringe and move on to another page, any page. Now that I’m almost finished repainting the many damaged pages I created a year ago, page 28 has floated like a corpse to the top of the stack. My job is to make this character, Betty Burro, cute. She also has to look like all of the other Betty Burro paintings in the book. Yikes!

We’re having weather straight from Hell. It’s 104 outside and close to 90 in the studio. The humans are sweating and the canines are panting. Our downstairs space, however, is a comfortable 72. So that I can work without sweating — and the dogs can be comfortable — I've decided to work down there. To do that, I need to move my work station downstairs…or, I need to install Clip Studio Paint on my iPad. I’ve tried it before and didn’t really take to it. I’m hoping that it works out better this time. Maybe I can overcome the bitter taste of my previous encounter. Maybe...

Page 60 Redrawn -- Jimmy Jay and Dylan Dolphin waking up

/

For page 60 I used a simple G-pen to replace the fuzzy pencil ink. I like the pencil-look, but I believe that I’m more likely to maintain a consistent style by sticking with simple ink lines.

My strategy is now to replace my “painterly” pages with simple line drawings. As for coloring, I’m using the bucket tool to lay down the base color, then using multiply and lighten layers to apply the shadows and highlights.