Hmm. So I keep looking at that genie “painting” I did yesterday, and I keep loving it. This is a place I’ve wanted to be with my art for years, but my love of Illustrator kept me away from. I could have been doing painterly cartoon stuff in Photoshop or Painter, but I couldn’t stand to lose all that lovely, lovely editability. Now Illustrator’s had a pass or two of speed optimization on these features, my computer’s an order of magnitude or two more powerful, and I can do things like “put the ‘roughen’ effect on 75% of the paths I draw in this image” and still have things run fast enough to be interactive at the very end of the drawing. Back when the features I’m leaning on were first introduced I tried doing painterly stuff and everything quickly ground to a halt.
Admittedly it can’t be hurting that I’ve also gotten a good handle on highly limited silhouettes and shading. But a lot of it is that my tools can finally manifest my vision.
I’ve been really pushing to figure this sort of look out for The Drowning City, and now I’m completely sure that I can make it look exactly like it needs to be. City is probably going to stay mostly greyscale but I’m pretty confident that I can speed up a lot of the process enough to keep it looking moody and painterly.
I wonder what kind of experiments I’ll be doing when I finish that book, a few years down the line. My skills and tools will have advanced another leap. Who knows?
But right now I should stop pondering the future so much and get back to work on Decrypting Rita. It’s astoundingly close to done; I just have a few mega-complicated pages staring me down, plus a couple dozen simple ones. None of them are gonna draw themselves.