The final pages are the results of my best work. If I say "I can do better than that" I have 2 options: either rework the drawings or move on and work on new ones. Neither are particularly ideal for me. Regardless of which option I choose, the fact remains that I can visibly see that there is improvement to be made in my mind and I should work harder to reach my desired skill level.

I've never had an assistant position. I am slowly making up for this. I've heard you have 2,000 bad pages in you before you start making good ones. I'm sure that's not an exact figure, but I sort of lament not having the opportunity to increase my skill on someone else's work : P So I guess I'm stuck working out problems on my own work. The sooner you get the experience out the way, the sooner you'll be making good work. However, I'm not going to make the mistake (again) of thinking that cumulative hours equals all the required experience needed to minimize mistakes. If you never learn to draw hands, for instance, spending 200 hours drawing comics won't necessarily remedy that. You need to focus on a specific problem.

I think reworking the drawings are better than passing over them. There are specific problems that need to be solved (hence the reason I think they're bad drawings) and skipping over them without analyzing, fixing, and preventing them will only mean I'll make the same mistakes in the future.

Too often I've been setting myself on 'autopilot' while I work by putting on music and not focusing. While I think this is desirable and fine in most cases, I need to figure out and be able to have complete focus when solving problems. That means interrupting the entertainment when necessary.

To sum up: Work on getting pages done, but don't forget that you're real goal is to gain proper experience and increase your skill levels. Do focused learning and practice just as often as working on finishing material.

New Name

I've been having some good results from drawing practice. I don't know why, but when I first began drawing the comic I only did a minimal amount of practice. I think at the time I was in a rush and figured I could practice and improve as I went along. This is probably ok for most folks, but I know myself well enough at this point that I generally can't tolerate 'practicing during a performance' and want to avoid it as much as possible.

Because of this method, I've essentially slipped back into the development phase of the comic. Over the last week or so I've been drawing characters from various angles and expressions to try and automatize them. I've also done a lot of focused drawing; rather than doodle the same character over and over I set goals for each drawing and tried to meet them. This resulted in a swift improvement. I worked a lot of kinks out of the characters.

A big and important step for me was the recent decision to reformat the first chapter. I've now split the 65 page chapter into smaller page numbers. My first chapter is now (probably) 6 pages. I don't really have a standard chapter count at this point. While I think it's good to have a standard to shoot for, given the context that I'm a single individual working alone on a self-published serial-- I don't have to play by the rules that a large publisher does, in terms of page count at least.

Also, the fact is that I haven't consistently put out a multi-page story for any substantial length of time is a crucial one. No matter how hard I wish and think that I would LIKE to draw 'x' number of pages per day/week/month does, my actual results aren't anywhere near my desires. To reiterate: it was a good idea to strip the comic down to essentials. Now I can focus on telling the story and find a comfortable length for my chapters based on my format.

By 'essentials' I means a simpler story and fewer drawings. The story is pretty simple, so that isn't a problem. I mean it in the sense that I'm going to be introducing fewer locales and characters right away. For instance, rather than having 5 different locations to draw in a chapter, I'm only going to have one, etc.

I also think stripping the story down was a good decision because I haven't worked consciously on backgrounds and I haven't worked consistently on finished material. These are crucial points that I still need experience with.

Problem Solving

Today I was pretty tired. Nevertheless, I did do some work. I corrected some faces and I drew some new ones. I decided not to draw faces on all the characters because some of the poses I may end up redrawing. Maybe I'm just tired, but something is bothering me and I can't tell what. I notice this feeling when I don't have a clear direction of what to do next. Part of it is that I haven't kept inventory on the bust shot panels that I need to finish. So, I don't know how many I've done and how many are left. The next problem may be because I haven't worked out any new drawing elements, only faces. Redrawing old panels felt like I was moving backwards rather than making progress, and attempting to make progress by working on new panels was frustrating because I didn't have enough planning done before hand. I keep forgetting to stop my timer, which is annoying as well.

Now that I've written it out, that's exactly the problem I was having. When I'm at home I want to work on the actual comic, not on preliminary sketches. I have two options then: work on sketches (hands, bodies, backgrounds, effects, etc.) or rework the older face panels.

Recap: Take inventory and redo the old panels. Take your time and move forward when you're really ready and don't get ahead of yourself.

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!

Breakthrough

So my goal is to finish all 64 pages of my comic before 2011. It's not looking very likely that it will happen at the desired level of quality. In other words, I can certainly draw all the pages but they may not look as good as I want them to.

I've decided on getting as far as I can and do one page at a time. I'd rather have 32 finished pages than 64 half finished pages. So the work needs doing, but I want to goof off! Instead, I'm going to at least set some kind of goal and play after I finish some work.

There are basically 2 kinds of goals: timed based and objective based.

If I had a timed based goal it would be something like- work for 6-8 hours. The upside to this goal is that I can eventually automatize a set timeframe for working and 'getting into it' won't be that difficult.

An objective based goal would be- finish 3-5 pages. If I am able to finish a realistically set goal, then there will certainly be time left over to do other things.

So here's my solution. Since my job hours are usually 4-12, I'll make that my work time frame. During that period, my goal is to get 1 page completely finished and then move on to complete more pages. I'll work from 4 until 11 tonight.

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This image represents a breakthrough! Over the last couple of days, I've been inking the simplest panels only. That means, I've basically been inking frontal bust shots.

This process has allowed me to experiment within the most controlled environment possible; an environment with relatively little variation. From doing this, a genuine flair for drawing the characters has emerged. For instance, in this panel I have begun to understand and improve upon Amber's hair style. I had other successful panels prior to this one, but again I really felt like this panel represented an 'aha!' moment.

Oh yes, and after I complete these easy panels, I'll move on to slightly more difficult panels- basically bust shots but with backgrounds or hands. This will allow me to take steps and progress with the least amount of frustration. Also, I did 2-3 pages worth of panels in a day! So my productivity is actually improving a little!

I inked a couple of yesterday's drawings, just to make sure. I think I have finally solved the layout drawing problem! While these aren't the greatest inks ever, and there are certainly a few touches that can be worked with, I'm at a state where I can move forward with the layout drawing phase without worry.



The solid black scabbard looks strange for some reason. I think it's because I'm not used to using blacks so often. Again, these are details I can think about later on. For now, I should go ahead and work on character layout drawings (again). I say again because there are a certain number of drawings I've done already using a g-pen.

By the way, I think Eichiro Oda uses a 'school' pen. That's the pen I'm using to draw the layout drawings now. It makes a uniform line, like a kabura pen, but it's different somehow.

Again, do some layout drawings and then come back once you have some new observations.

My goal for Sunday is to draw as many pictures of Roland as possible. Also, clean up any unnecessary layers.