This week: C

You finished on time. Overall, you didn't really progress much. There's not really much new to say. The same problems of carelessness are there. Actually, its mostly a matter of creating a style at this point. I think much of it comes from not being able to see the image on paper, and concluding not alot can be done until then. Get some printer ink! Another thing is that I haven't had practice with certain models, so rather than take the time to learn them I just go to finish. Not the best idea.

Yesterday, I was noticeably pickier with my drawings than usual. After some thought, I decided to focus on explaining the head construction principles I've acquired over the years but rarely, if ever, have recognized. This will root out any bad principles and reinforce the good ones, since I'm essentially teaching the material to myself rather than burying it, untested, in my subconscious.

I want to continue with this method for as long as necessary. That means, I'm getting rid of the 64 page deadline. Going through and organizing my thoughts and putting the good ones into practice is going to be more beneficial in the long run since I'll be ridding myself of deep seeded habits that could continue to bother me for who knows how long.

The first thing I need to do is work out generic head principles. Then I need to state specific design principles for my current characters. I'm going to briefly mention the principles that I'm most familiar with and elaborate on the less known ones. Actually, after some thinking it seems I need only to state the specific design principles for specific characters.

My goal in a pure design sense is appeal. That's super abstract and something I'm not going to tackle right now, so I'll say appealing 'to me' for the time being.

General

Eyes- usually slightly angled outward at the top of the eye. Almost as if you're drawing slightly mad eye expressions. Size of the eye isn't an issue. Usually larger pupils are more appealing, but Dragon Ball has proven an exception, since Toriyama uses dot eyes. As I suspect it's the space he creates AROUND the pupils that makes for an appealing balance.

Eyes closer together are usually not as appealing. Dragon Ball is the exception again. I'll have to experiment more formally, but I've noticed that the closer of the two eyes in a 3/4 angle drawing is more appealing when skewed closer to the ear. In other words, leave some space between the closer eye and the nose.

Ears-

Hair proportions

Glasses- put little circles near the top left or right of both lenses. The eyes need to meet the top rim of the glasses, which means there should be some space between the bottom part of the eye and the lower glasses rim.

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I'm leaving the previous text up because it prompted the following developments and I think it's worth keeping. On some actual paper I began drawing some characters and bit by bit dissecting and reforging them into the most appealing things I can. I should note this was only ACTUALLY possible once I was somewhat familiar with the character. It seems after awhile my subconscious feelings of 'something isn't right' began to actually surface into something I could grasp... this is in general a very awkward transition as a person and over time I'd like to minimize the 'downtime' associated with figuring out a particular problem.

To rephrase the previous bit: Humans don't have 'instincts' to begin with. It takes a certain amount of time/ experience with a 'problem' before I actually recognize that there is a problem. Then I have to figure out what the problem is. Then I have to figure out how to solve it. Then I have to experiment until the problem is solved.

Back to the comic. My goal going forward is to begin drawing in the heads of all the panels and experimenting with new elements as the opportunities arise.

Notes

I've been mostly working offline over the past week. While I put in 4-5 hours of drawing on the computer, I've been drawing around twice that much when I'm at work. Most of it has been problem solving stuff, elements that I'm not too used to. I've noticed that in the process of practicing that I've stretched my muscles in these areas resulting in rediscovered skills.

Hands



My hands drawings have been crap lately. Historically, I seem to recall my skill fluctuating. I was doing some hand drawing practice and at one point I decided to switch from a realistic bone structure to cartoon balloon hands. The results were really good. All of a sudden I was able to remember how to draw hands properly! After a while of drawing with cartoon hands, I switched back to more realistic hands and they were much better looking. I think I still have some kinks to work out, but I'll wait until they actually arise when I'm inking before tackling this subject again.

Backgrounds



I don't draw backgrounds very often. Most of my time is spent trying to make natural, appealing looking characters. So, one day I began drawing backgrounds of the various locales in my comic. By doing this, I was able to work out general problems about texture balance, where the shadows and half tone lines (crosshatch) marks need to be, room props and so forth. Going forward, I need to practice drawing lots of props. Also, experiment with line widths for background drawings.

Effects




One effect I've been focused on recently is what looks like a variation of the kirby crackle... But I've only ever seen it in manga. Either way, I love the effect and want to use it as often as possible. I practiced it once on a panel. This version isn't very confident. It was a cold run, and I've since practiced and studied the effect in detail so I'll be redrawing the panel. It was actually pretty simple.


So tonight continue to practice drawing these elements some more!

For my next trick...

I seem to think it a good idea to finish the whole comic in a low quality. My goal will be to give myself a limited amount of time to work on each page and record the observations and results. I'll start with 1:30 and adjust as needed. Basically, I want a readable copy finished which I'll then follow up with notes on how to improve.

My first hour I realized something: The end results of my drawings are the same. I want to solve the problem at the root, rather than waste time finishing a drawing of poor quality and continuously improve it until I'm satisfied. If I solve the problems as soon as possible and replace the bad habits with good ones... Well, who knows what could happen. It sounds a little crazy if you ask me.

Let's look at my first specimen.


Stage 1: This drawing has some nice energy to it, looking back. Why did I take the handles out? Oh wait, it's because I'm too lazy to figure out how handles work!

Here's an attempt to make the hands look more natural when holding a sword. I think I'll go back and do something similar to the hands in the blue sketch.

A cleanup. Notice all the problems and how I didn't take time to fix them. I wasn't completely focused on the drawing.

Again, rather than fixing the problems, I go ahead and finish the drawing. Nice job... As a side note, I need to find a way to vary the line quality. Perhaps turning the opacity down more on the under drawing so I can see the line variation better.


On the surface, the line quality isn't very good. However, line quality ultimately doesn't matter. If the drawing isn't appealing, then it is the drawing itself and not the finish. There are several construction problems to work out:

The left side of the hair shape.
Sword hilt.
Hands.
Sheath clasps.
Sparkles.

You have to be able to consistently draw well constructed layout drawings before doing faster versions from which to ink. Let me say that again: There are no shortcuts. Pay attention to what you're drawing and ask whether what you're doing makes sense or not.

Steps for improvement-
1) Have model
2) Construct drawings

Begin with those two steps and record the results.

Looks like most of the old problems are solved. Honestly, it isn't that drastic a change. It looks like the sword hilt is better constructed. My hands overall need work. The line quality is better, but not great. I think the shopkeeper's head should be lowered significantly and replaced with sparkles and such.

I'll stop working on this drawing for now and pick another panel.

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Ok, so I've done quite a few things in the last few hours. I seem to have built up a bunch of problems subconsciously, resulting in an overload of failures. So, let me see if I can't define all the problems down one by one and decide what to do next.


I don't have all the variations of this panel, but what was going on during this time was experimentation with line thickness and stroke. I dropped the thickness from (probably) .80 mm down to .70 mm in .05 mm intervals. The goal was to get the same 'default' line that Akira Toriyama has. This also led for a brief experiment with stroke. The only purpose was to give the option 'another shot' to try to emulate the g-pen look. Stroke on definitely does achieve the g-pen look but it doesn't look like Toriyama's style nor my own.

Here is a panel with what I consider to be the ideal thickness to shoot for. Actually, the balance is very good too, so I should say this is the ideal drawing. This drawing was not achieved with stroke on, and it was drawn in the .80 mm range. It doesn't necessarily emulate on the surface Akira Toriyama's inking style.

Also during this time, I began to experiment with blacks and shapes. I don't have any examples and I'm not going to make any new ones, but as an example I took the shopkeepers hair and made it black and then played around with the proportions. This didn't last very long, but I imagine it contributed to some of the anxiety build-up.

I was reading some One Piece during a break and I noticed that the character lines are inked quickly and almost crudely. Actually, I've noticed this before. The main point is that the drawing has to be appealing without the finish in order to be a good drawing. I keep gravitating toward the line quality instead of finding out how to fix the drawing itself.

So now that I've resolved that conflict, it's back to work.


Here's the best solution to my problem so far. I've found a pen with a uniform line that I'm drawing with. I seem to be able to cut right to the chase in terms of seeing construction problems right away without distractions.

Here are a few successes:



These all look like they're constructed just fine. I'm glad I barreled through this problem. Maybe for the next step I should ink a couple of these and see how they turn out... Or maybe I should draw some other characters. Hmm...