Just popping in to recommend the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. It’s not like any other time management book I’ve read – there are no ‘tips’ or ‘tricks’ to exercise while cooking dinner or write a book while running a marathon. It’s more about recognizing that we have limited time and tough decisions need to be made about what is going to get done and what isn’t. It’s helped me focus on what’s important in my creative pursuits but also life in general.
This book is a part of the reason I’ve been pretty quiet here on my website – it really changed how I look at my creative work and I’ve been (slowly) more productive in the things that are truly important to me. One of my biggest lessons from the book is not to try to do too many things at once. I have so many creative projects and I used to think that if I touched each one that I was somehow still making progress on all of them at once. But that wasn’t the case and this book helped me to see the truth of that. Now I am actually making measurable, exciting progress on the children’s book I’ve wanted to write for years.
Unfortunately, this means thatmy comics, which I was really using as drawing practice for the children’s book, have intentionally fallen by the wayside. As has my music creation. And my other writing projects. Sometimes the hardest decision is choosing between two things we REALLY want to do. One day, I’ll have time again for my other creative pursuits and I look forward to that day. But for now, I am enjoying getting closer and closer to my goal of publishing my picture book.
I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting in my digital art program, Rebelle, to try and figure out how to quickly draw comics. Because the fact of the matter is, I have a lot of creative projects that I’m working on and my webcomics are just one of many. If I’m going to actually get them out with any regularity, I need my process of drawing and coloring to be quick. It has taken many days of digital painting, experimenting, googling and watching YouTube videos but I think I’m finally there.
The BIGGEST discoveries were the magic wand and paint bucket tool. I then had some trouble with pesky ‘white lines’ around my linework when I used the two tools together, but I finally figured out that upping the tolerance of the magic wand to 100 fixed it. SUCCESS!
Luz from Owl House (which we’ve been loving over here) is who I decided to draw as my ‘test subject.’
Now the process of coloring in a character for my webcomic can be so much faster.
My brother and sister-in-law are having their first baby and I wanted to challenge myself by making the invite to their baby shower. I’ve been creating art on Rebelle for a while now and I think it came out pretty well. I used mostly watercolor and learned A LOT about drawing flowers and creating a design with multiple layers while working on this project. I think if I could do it over again, I would choose a limited color palette to work from.
They are both really into nature so we chose a ‘Baby in Bloom’ theme with lots of greenery and flowers. My brother hails from Louisiana while his wife hails from Vietnam so I incorporated flowers that were from both places. I’m particularly proud of how the roses turned out.
Alternative Title Ideas: -The 6 Stages of Making a Comic or a Souffle or Anything Really -The 6 Stages of a Man Trying to Find the G-Spot (Which May or May Not Exist) -The 6 Stages of Helping Your Grandmother Set Up Her New Phone
What alternative title can you think of? Let me know in the comments.
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