The Pen Monster Blog

This week I decided that I will do some work on the other comic script I have about the invention of Nu Metal in a world that sadly never discovered the joys of Limp Bizkit.

Lessons learnt his afternoon;

• Get a good night's sleep or you will spend hours doing stupid things like constantly drawing on the wrong layer which makes corrections nigh impossible.

• If you're lacking sleep don't go for a photo walk and forget to bring a water bottle with you.

• Guitars are harder to draw than you think. Even with a reference. Perhaps because of the reference.

• Don't need that Marshal amp and speaker for the picture to work? Don't draw it in full before cutting it.

• I'll probably use the balloon pen tool in Clip Studio more.

I'm almost fully settled in to my new home and I have begun drawing again. I'm going give all square panels a go for pt2 because I can tell the difference between "I don't want to draw backgrounds!" and "This is a dynamic panel layout!" even if most can't.

Been busy. My new home has a shed in the back and my new neighbours are cats and horses. I have gotten back to work on my foolish-if-you're-practical retirement comic.

How are you?

What I have learnt this past 20 days of trying to pump out comics at an expected rate;

a) I must have a good office chair and desk if I want to draw and my emergency week at the kitchen table was painful. Thankfully I have both.

b) Flash flooding makes it hard to work.

c) I can get about four panels done a day if I can get into the flow. Five if they're simple panels. Three if I'm having a bad back day.

d) I still need to work more on my spot blacks. Some panels are a bit off balance.

While I have been working in a format designed for smartphones (Tapas first. Maybe?) I'm going to have to redo a lot to make it look a bit more traditional for other hosting sites. Resizing the art will be easy. It's rewriting the dialog to fit that will be the chore.

And then I release it to the sound of crickets.