Day 85: Week 13 Summary

One thing that I've learned by immersing myself in the technical side of creating a comic is that I don't know jack.  It was easier to feel like I was improving by leaps and bounds when I was using a traditional medium and following a course structure.  That is such a small piece of the puzzle these days.  Not to mention Clip Studio recently released an animation extension for adding motion comics to the process, which I'm really excited about.

The breakdown, as I understand it now:

1. Prepare draft work in traditional a medium (i.e. pencil / paper)
2. Scan and manipulate that image to reduce the amount of noise that might be picked up around the lines.
3. Import that scanned image into a vector program to process the raster image into a vector image so that you can more freely manipulate size and position without losing quality.
4. Import that into your art program of choice, in my case Manga Studio.
5. Create a base layer under it, an ink layer over it, a separate layer for each base color in the design.
6. Add rough lines, clean up lines, drop in base colors, add shadows, at lights, and you should get something like a finished product.

At least, that's my understanding as a rank amateur.  I'm hoping I can convince some of my club members to let me shoulder surf they're work process to create a kind of walk through guide for their method and tools to see if I can fill in any blanks I might be missing.

Ideally, I would like to finish the Manga Studio for Dummies book and some of the exercises in it before I switch back over to focusing on creating something.  My most optimistic guess for that would be next week.  So if I can get back into actually drawing on the first of next month, I'll consider that a win.

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Metrics

Pages Read This Week	0
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1170
Books Completed Since Launch	12
Total Tutorial Run-time	11 hours 46 minutes
Days Since Launch	85
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	82
Drawing Time This Week	5 hours
Drawing Time Total	83 hours 49 minutes

* I'm considering Friday to be the end of the week for tracking metrics so that it lines up with my summary posts.

** I had to use a some fuzzy math to figure the page count for some of my Kindle books since they only have location tagging.