Y'all, Some of you may know I've been suffering with an RSI on my right hand for a while now, and well, it's been a process to get my hand feeling better, a big part of it has been trying to change my art process, doing stretches, working less, taking more breaks, that sort of thing.
Well, as it happens, completely parallel to that, I've been overhauling my Patreon page, and one of the new benefits I introduced were timelapses for my bigger projects that I recorded using Clip Studio Paint's in-built feature to post for $10 patrons.
Introducing this feature a bit to those unaware, under "file" you can find a timelapse menu, and from it you can choose to record a timelapse, you have to pick that option as soon as you start on a canvas since it won't save anything retroactively. The feature can't record actual movement, instead, each stroke and action just appears instantly in the canvas, like with the undo and redo feature.
Be warned though: It'll make your files explode in size, like in the order of gigabytes. Thankfully once you're done with the drawing and export your timelapse, you can uncheck the "record timelapse" button and it'll stop recording and delete all recording data, bringing your file back to normal size. Just DON'T FORGET TO DO IT!
So anyways, when you're exporting, you can choose the duration of the timelapse. 60 seconds is the default option and the one I just went with for my first experiments with the feature, but there's another option, one registers each individual stroke and action. With that option, a comic page created a 10 minute-long timelapse. And well, I didn't really plan on sending files that big to my patrons, but I thought it'd be interesting to see what that looked like.
What I saw left me speechless.
I don't know how to explain to you the abject terror that coursed through my blood once the sketch part of the timelapse ended, and the lineart began... My friends, it was like every line jittered into place. Every. Single. Stroke. Repeated at least 3 times. I had no idea I used the undo button this much. Completely unneeded too, it was some subconscious perfectionism that I didn't realize I was struggling with until I was forced to spend 10 minutes just, looking at it. In complete silence. Looking at the horror show displaying in my monitor at 10x speed, and then at my aching drawing hand.
I had my fucking answer. This was destroying me, that was the worst case scenario of a Repetitive Strain Injury. And I only realized because of the timelapse, otherwise it wouldn't even cross my mind to question why my lineart was taking longer and longer with every drawing.
People often compliment the colors on my art, wanna know how much of the timelapse time was taken up by coloring? 20% of it. Just, the final little 20%. The rest was taken up by redrawing the same pose and rearranging sketches... and then redrawing the same lines another countless times, chasing this self destructive perfection.
If your drawing program doesn't have a timelapse recording feature, try using some recording software and then speeding up the results. I don't know if you'll have an epiphany as large as mine, but I'm positive there will be some insights to gain from it.
I've finished doing the lineart for another comic page since learning of this problem, now running with my mistakes more often, letting lineart be imperfect, and it looks fine. And my clock reads that it took half the time to do it all.
