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.
As I am working on defining my particular drawing style, I’ve been noticing that many webcomic artists use a very particular color palette that helps differentiate and define their comic. As I try to define what I might want my own webcomics to look like, I decided to compile a sheet of all my favorite webcomic’s color palettes. I thought I’d share it here in case anyone else was interested. Disclaimer: this is not an extensive list of every single color ever used in every single one of their webcomics, but it is enough to give me a good idea of their color palette.
These are all webcomic’s that I follow or have followed and I highly recommend all of them. Most of them can either be found on the Webtoon app or the TinyView app but some have their own websites such as The Oatmeal.
Some of them like Art by Moga and Strange Planet by Nathan Pyle have, what seem to me, very clear color palettes. Interestingly enough, these are also the two comics that use something other than pure black for their line work. I recently experimented with this for the first time while drawing a character from The Book of Mistakes by Corinna Luyken and I really liked it – I feel that it adds an extra layer of interest. Perhaps that’s why they have such clearly defined color palettes? Any color looks good with a black line but not every color looks good with brown line work or a deep blue-pink line.
Many of the webcomics use black and white almost exclusively and use color as just an accent. It also appears that many of them just use whatever color best fits the comic they happen to working on at the time although most of the time they do lean more towards a certain saturation (i.e. more pastels or more bright colors).
Personally, I can see how a defined color palette could be quite freeing but I can also see how it would be restricting. So the moral of the story is: do what you want and what you like the best because if you don’t like the colors you are working with, you won’t actually enjoy drawing.
Me, this morning, realizing that the CDC is meeting today to (hopefully) approve Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccines for the 5-11 age group. The vote is scheduled for 4:15pm ET/3:15pm CT and I am literally counting down the hours.
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