wobble bopper

This is a digital rough of a traditional painting I'm working on!

Oh this is beautiful 🥺

During my birdwatching trip last weekend, this crow was staring at me from a branch just above me, so I just had to take a quick shot.

Crows are so fun to watch, particularly around other birds. I was at the park for 4 hours, and I saw:

• a bunch of crows chase off a bald eagle
• a bunch of crows chase off an osprey
• a red wing blackbird chase off a crow.

Hi. I'm very late to Webcomics Day. The concept this year was to nicely showcase what the progression of your work looks like through layers of completion on a single page, but because of the way I am, this is not very easy.

The first thing I do is sketch the page. This can be anything between thumbnail scribbles, nice pencil drawings with panels, or a bunch of floating character headshots with speech bubbles on a random piece of paper. I then scan these and add them to the page document. I usually do digital tweaks to the scans until I am satisfied with the panel layout and composition. I add vector speech bubbles at this stage too. The goal is (was... it's done) to make the entire book comprehensibly readable, so editors can read it and suggest changes before I put in actual elbow grease.

Second stage is modelling important background elements in Blender. I'm not very good at this, mostly because I am new to Blender and terribly impatient. My models are usually a vague sketch of a hardscape environment that I then draw clutter over. My vehicle models are much nicer and that's because they were commissioned from people who have years of learned skill that I don't.

Third step is when I actually start the finished page. I usually draw the character lines and flats (unshaded tones) before anything else because I find it fun and easy. I don't recommend this, it sometimes makes the next step inconvenient. I frequently start flats or shading before I've finished lines, because I get bored of doing lines. I don't recommend this either.

Last step is backgrounds, and etc. If I need a Blender model, first I load an .fbx copy into the Clip Studio file and position it; then I often have to resize and reposition the characters I've already drawn, and then I grind out all the background lines and tones. Usually shade the characters around this time. This is also the time when I finally fill in miscellaneous stuff I've been dreading; like conlangs, technical details of equipment and props, conlangs, time conversions, and computer screen displays.

Then the page is done. And I move on to the next one. Someday, perhaps, I will be done with all of them (so that I can work on the next book). Hope this was insightful. Take a peek at some of the other great artists making online comics, who posted in the #WebcomicsDay tag yesterday. Read Runaway to the Stars over here.

This is a project I've been following for many years, I think it's important Nonbinary Science, and for me it's a valuable prompt for Yearly Gender Introspection.
If the image above invites you to take part I think you should do it.

There's a question asking how you found the survey. Last year we got Cohost pretty high on the leaderboard for the final data. I think we can do even better this time, especially since we're no longer a write-in!