Today’s inch forward was to paint the conference image. Tommy Toucan is panicking while Carlos Crocodile is thinking about what he’ll be eating for lunch. From the look of his paunch, he’s been eating well. Betty Burro has a funny ear that looks like metal instead of fur. I have to work on that. That janky left ear consumed 80% of my time today and it’s still not right.
Today everything seemed hard and exhausting. I felt like i was trying to run through an swamp of gelatin. I fiddled with picture #8 for most of the day and hated the results. I was working with 20 layers and going nuts. I took a break, read a little about VIncent Van Gogh’s family life in Zundert, and counted myself lucky to have small problems. With an improved outlook on life, I returned to #8, deleted the hateful layers, and was able to finish painting it. I then went on to picture #32, which introduces the long-lost Uncle Johnny Jay, a buddhist, and enjoyed finishing it.
I’m aware that my graphic style is still inconsistent. But I’m also aware that my style is more consistent than it was 6 months ago. In a couple of years I might actually have a style.
I considered adding captions to these images, but I can’t find a way to add them when I’m in Squarespace’s “gallery” mode. There’s probably away to add captions, but it’s not obvious to me.
After coloring three drawings today, I collapsed into a sweet coma on the Ikea Kivik. With each drawing the Apple pencil became heavier and heavier, until it felt as if I were curling a 20-lb dumbbell.
Buddy Butterfly is featured today. He seems to be an arrogant little guy. I don’t know what he’s trying to prove. You would think that he would be happy to be part of the Jay family, but it looks like his personal issues are surfacing. I think it’s always more interesting when there’s a mischievous character stirring up trouble.
Today’s post is a spoiler — Jimmy and buddy are alive even though they fell down that bird-eating chimney! They’re just lucky that it was deactivated years ago by the new home owner, Bernie the Buddhist Dachshund. Of course, the chimney is still lined with soot, which explains why they’re so filthy. Bernie decommissioned the wood burning stove because it was a gross polluter with a big carbon footprint. He kept it as a lovely decorative antique. Bernie has a great sense of interior design.
The news of the day is that the iPad can work with ethernet. My file transfer problem is solved. It does mean that I will be adding another dongle to my personal Dongle Hell. My desk is a snake pit of cables. Still, I’m happy that my iPad Pro is no longer a $1,000 brick.
When I work on this image, which shows Momma Jay is expressing disappointment in her son, I think I’m moving the story towards more sophisticated readers, perhaps into the 6 to 10 years-old age range. This picture shows a mother scolding her son, which is contrary to what you would expect from the usual children’s book mother. Children’s books for youngsters and tykes show mothers and fathers who are invariably warm, loving, and supportive. In my story, Momma Jay is disappointed and upset that her son has disobeyed her and has done something so dangerous that he could have lost his life. The reader will be aware that she’s being unfair to Jimmy — Buddy was the instigator, not Jimmy! Momma Jay is scolding the wrong person. So much drama!
At last I’ve finished re-inking. I started coloring today. I’m about 2 months behind my original deadline, but I’m moving steadily. For the coloring I’ll be using my iPad. I found that I can hook up my iPad to my desktop Mac by using the power cable. No other USB-C cable will work. The bad news is that I can only export images created on the iPad by “sharing” them to the iPad photos app; once they’re save as photos I hook up the iPad to the desktop Mac and open them in the desktop Photos app. It’s a hateful hack.
“I’m bored,” said Jimmy.
Note to self: add Jimmy’s playthings strewn carelessly around him. I want to show that he’s bored with everything that has amused him, his mobile phone, his music, and his comic books. Life is so painful when your toys lose their charm, and the craving for new adventures clouds your judgement. Jimmy’s friend Buddy Butterfly will contribute to his delinquency, and mayhem will ensue.
MEMO: Adjust Buddy’s color!
A few posts ago I pondered the foolishness of changing software in the middle of a project. Climbing the learning curve of a professional quality graphic editor is really spinning your wheels when you have a deadline. But I did it anyway.
I’m now using Affinty Photo for iPad to color my images. After some initial confusion and frustration, I was able to learn enough in one day to color several images. The irony is that I opened them in Photoshop to clean them up for this blog post.
So far I’m intrigued by Affinity Photo, but I have to say, it has an amazingly incomprehensible color picker. Something that should be drop-dead simple turns out to be mind-boggling. There are actually three color pickers, and they all seem to do something different! After an hour of fumbling and googling I found a way to pick colors, but it wasn’t with the color picker tool in the left sidebar, nor was it with the color picker in the color panel — I have no clue what those two color pickers do. The color picker in the brush color panel does work the way Photoshop’s color picker works…I think.
Today is the first day of my one-week vacation, which explains why there are two pictures in this post. Affinity Photo has a lot more brushes than I wanted to deal with today, so I created a simple round brush with 50% opacity, 5% flow, with size modulated by pressure — basically a marker brush. It worked great and was not at mysterious, puzzling, or baffling.
92/365
I colored today’s drawing in Photoshop rather than Sketchbook. It went okay, but I had to do without a few of Sketchbook’s really handy features. In Sketchbook you can switch to the previous brush by hitting “S”. But in Photoshop there’s no way to switch to the previous tool—you have to back to the brush palette. The other Sketchbook feature I missed, my favorite in fact, was the built-in Copic color palette that shows the complements of every selected color. There’s nothing like that in Photoshop, as far as I know. My workaround was to do a screen print of the Sketchbook Copic palette, open it in Photoshop, and select colors from that. Poor me—I have so many grass-is-greener problems! Wherever you go, you’re gonna have problems.
