I was procrastinating and idly browsing some porn. I thought it would look cool with some deep shadows, then added the snake because nipples. Scales are a blend of an art brush because there was no way I was going to draw those all by hand.
Alternative title: HEY LOOK IM PAT NAGEL.
I think I found a better workflow for positioning my reference models.
Trying to match the camera by fucking around in Silo was a lot of work, and doing it in Blender is just totally not happening. But this seems like it can go pretty quickly, now that I’ve worked out how to do it once!
why am I pondering what project to do when rita is finished while I fold my laundry
a. I’m right about at the halfway point of Rita, it’ll probably take another year and a half to finish, and that’s if I can get this “regular update schedule” thing happening and stick to it
b. I pretty much know what I want to do when I’ve finished Rita anyway: some combination of resuming Absinthe and starting Drowning City.
c. Speaking of comics about Lingering Trauma In New Orleans, I really don’t know what to think about this Kickstarter. The pitch is… I dunno. It just feels REALLY OBVIOUS in the way anything involving superheros seems to end up being obvious, you know?
d. I guess part of why I’m pondering future projects is that I know how Rita’s going to go from here. There may be a few surprises for me along the way, but I have all the major high points plotted out. I’m trying to think how I felt at the halfway point in the Tarot deck and it was pretty different – that’s when I drew the 99 of Pentacles and the 0 of (VOID), which really ended up being part of the keys to turning it into something that was emphatically mine when all was said and done. The extra cards (and more than a few of the second half of the cards) ended up really being about the future I want to have.
e. There were also still some major mysteries in the Tarot project at the halfway point. I still had no idea how to make the Courts work. There were still a few Majors that I’d been struggling with since the first night I sat down and doodled a bunch of them. There were definitely some big problems to solve. Rita? I have the theme down. I have the plot planned. There are lots of little problems left to iron out but mostly it’s just a matter of drawing another 90-120 pages. At the rate of 2 pages a week that’s about another year, give or take a month.
f. I guess the question really comes down to, is this what I want to be doing for the net year or so? And honestly I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing.
g. I guess I just needed something to keep my brain active while I was folding laundry. Which is kind of an unpleasant task right now since the dryer leaves them still fairly moist. I really should poke the landlord about that.
Anyway. I’ve hung up all the laundry so I guess now it’s time to get on with spending the next few years drawing comics.
I have finally found a great solution for those tough angles.
1. Stick my phone into my Gorillapod tripod.
2. Launch Camera+ on my phone, switch to the front camera, turn on its timer mode, and set that to repeat.
3. Put the tripod on something. Probably the 15″ tall bong that lives on my desk.
4. Grab stand-ins needed for any props, and pose!
5. Move the photos to the computer by dumping them into Evernote and forcing a sync; bring ’em into my work in progress and start drawing.
Right now there are actually two whole pages of Rita in the queue. In about a half an hour, this will go back down to one, as the first one – finished and uploaded last week – goes live.
I’ve decided on some rules to try and follow to get my shit back in order here.
1. Start each weekday by assigning eight pomodoros worth of work for the day. That’s about four hours of solid, uninterrupted work. Experience has shown that I tend to only get about half of them done, but that’s still better than the one hour I’ve been managing lately because oh god fuck my work ethic these past few months. These work units will not all be Rita – there’s other things that need doing too!
2. I am not allowed to let my buffer shrink. Every time a page posts, I have to have at least replaced it with a new page queued up. Mega bonus points for having gotten ahead far enough that there’s a replacement plus another page.
3. Once I’ve started rebuilding the habit of “working a lot” start gradually raising my expectations as to how much I actually get done in a day, whether it be by disciplining myself to actually check more of those pomodoros off before the end of the day, or by assigning myself more to do in the morning and still only getting about half of ’em done. Whichever way works best to motivate Impulsive, Lazy Peggy to do what Thoughtful Peggy With A Mission wants to have happen.
Hopefully this will eventually result in me pulling far enough ahead that I can consider things like changing the schedule to 3 pages a week, or putting book 2 or 3 up on Kickstarter early enough that prompt delivery of the book will mean backers get to read it ahead of online readers. Hey, I can dream.
Also it is time to resume aikido and yoga. My rib’s still a little grumpy but it’s largely fine. I was intending to hit up aikido tonight, but I only had about an hour between getting home and the start of class; too soon after about four hours of travel between my hotel in Portland and my apartment. So yoga tomorrow, and aikido the day after. And again and again and again.
Several hours of beer and Cards did a lot for my mood last night. So did trading a Rita with Phil Foglio, who was all “It’s great… WHEN IT UPDATES.”
When one of your idols gives you shit for not updating regularly, I think it’s time to try and get this thing back in gear. I’ve been letting moodiness and the lure of video games get in the way. And guilt about other art things I’m behind on, as well.
I was already thinking “okay it’s time to try and get back on a schedule” last night. Hopefully Phil’s friendly hassling will be the kick in the ass I need!
It’s also time to get on top of exercise again. My rib is mostly healed and I am just getting TWITCHY.
I think I might put a sign over my computer to the effect of “Phil Foglio has not missed an update in thirteen years” as a motivational reminder…
Stuff I did today:
I’m back at the hotel and debating if I feel like hitting the opening night party for the comics con I’m down here for. There will be music, free food, free beer, and video games from Ground Kontrol. So that’s tempting.
Tomorrow: con, Cards Against Humanity at Jirris & Mordena’s place. Sunday: con. And somewhere during con there will be the Stumptown Comics Arts Awards, and maybe I’ll get one for “best new talent”. Which would be nice. But hell, I’ve had a pretty good weekend already, that’ll just be icing on the cake.
This is possibly the best SHUT UP STOP WORRYING JUST DRAW inspirational piece I have ever seen.
Oh, man. I should have done this little tweak AGES ago.
So there’s this palette in Illustrator called “Pathfinder”. You can select a few paths and perform various Boolean operations on them. It used to do this as a live effect; the individual paths would remain separately editable. If you wanted it to be permanent, you could hold down alt while clicking on the Pathfinder palette’s buttons, and it would spit out one path that looked like the result. I don’t think I ever held down alt; the whole reason I love Illustrator so much is that so much stuff is constantly malleable.
A few versions back, they “fixed” the Pathfinder palette by swapping the sense of the alt key. Now the default is to make a hard-to-edit single path; you have to hold down alt to keep it editable the way I like it. No prefs switch to set it to the old behavior, either. And I found myself using the Pathfinder less and less, opting for the sloppier route of just drawing the composite shape by hand most of the time. I’d just get a little burst of annoyance every time I had to hold down alt, you know?
The other day, I recorded some actions of hitting the three Pathfinder buttons I use the most (minus front, unite, and intersect) and bound them to some f-keys. I would have bound them to more mnemonic key combos like cmd-alt-m/u/i or something, but your only options for assigning hotkeys to actions are the f-keys. And holy fuck it is so much nicer to be drawing away, then select a few paths and hit a hotkey than it is to visit a palette and snarl a little deep inside as I remember to alt-click instead of click.
I feel like I’ve just recovered that one tool that is exactly the right thing in certain situations, after having to make do by using other tools for a few years.
(And if you use Illustrator and don’t use the pathfinders much… play with them, get to know what they can do! Executing live Boolean operations on a few shapes is a great way to build shapes that really belongs in your toolbox, IMHO.)
I nearly forgot to mention this here: I’m up for “Best New Artist” in the Stumptown Comcs Arts Awards! Voting closes at noon on tuesday, so if you want to vote for me, do it now.