So right now I am working on a 13-page comic about a lady magician and her demon sidekick getting into trouble at a rave that 2016 me roughed out. 2022 me found it recently and decided it’s still good, so I’m finishing it.
Today I did an important part of bringing it up to 2022-me’s standards: I’m making Graphic Styles for everything in the model sheet. This took about two hours total; the model sheet contains a generic version of these two characters (seen above), as well as them in Magical Rave gear, and Khebunassvem (the demon) in Combat Mode.
This is no small amount of fiddly bullshit; it takes time to pack all this stuff up into named swatches, and time to think about the most efficient way to make Illustrator draw a bunch of shit for me. This was two hours on top of character designs that were 100% done by the standards of 2016 me. Plus a few design revisions, Chloe used to have straight hair but I decided curly felt better.
Two hours is nothing to sneeze at. But this is the payoff. These are the paths I have to draw, using these various styles. Illustrator then does a bunch of stylistic stuff to it and makes it look cool. I don’t have to fiddle with drawing any of those ragged edges, or even remembering which brush I use. I just say “I’m gonna draw Chloe’s hair”, find the right section in the Graphic Styles, click on the appropriate style, and draw a loose shape that Illustrator noodles a bunch of curls around. Kheb’s tail and its little spade is just one line. All that Kirby Krackle in Combat Kheb’s wings and aura is done by Illustrator around simple shapes. Doing most of the rest of this comic is now gonna be super fast; I just look at my roughs and quickly flesh them out into full drawings, without ever having to fiddle with trying to remember what brush I used at what size and in which color. If I ever draw another story with these two then I can reuse all this work. Probably with a little time to design new costumes for whatever situation they’re in.
If you wanna have a look at the Illustrator source and see what kind of crazy tricks I used, it’s over on Patreon.