Day 120: Week 18 Summary

Pretty productive week for crunching out the exercise.  I was able to get in a mentor session from one of the senior guys at the comic club I go to, which helped to get me out of the 1 hour and done routine.  I'm planning to do more extended practice sessions when my family are overseas visiting the in-laws.

I'm also nailing down the final design for a panel that will be included in our t-shirt design.  So it's another chance to work in some innate practice.  Lots of practice doing thumbnails so far anyway.  I haven't settled into a final version that I want to work all the way through yet.

The original idea to have tutorial and book reviews is in need of some rework too.  There's only so many books I can read in a week and as unlimited as the YouTube channels seem to be, I'm not trying to throw out artists that I don't actually think are helpful.  What I'm leaning towards doing is adding the reviews as they come up and filling in the empty days with drawing challenges.

That should encourage me to work outside my comfort zone a little and post finished drawings a little more regularly.  For now it's back to the drawing board for me.

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Metrics

Pages Read This Week	6
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1456
Books Completed Since Launch	13
Total Tutorial Run-time	12 hours 52 minutes
Days Since Launch	120
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	115
Drawing Time This Week	10 hours 6 minutes
Drawing Time Total	111 hours

* 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.

Day 113: Week 17 Summary

I either need to improve my time management skills or find an extra hours in the day.  The anatomy drills have been pretty ... meh.  I haven't had a lot of luck with doing dedicated proportion practice so I went back to mixing it with gesture drawings.  A little application to go along with all that theory.

The Bamboo Fineline never felt right to me.  I had to put an uncomfortable amount of pressure on the screen to register a full line.  So I decided to take the dive and order my own Gen 3 Bamboo Stylus Solo.  The soft mesh like tip makes a funny squeaky noise when I'm drawing, but it has a much better response to pressure.  Now I just have to practice drawing at two-thirds speed so the slight delay on my iPad doesn't mess up my lines.

Didn't get as much drawing done this week.  The gesture drawings and what not are mostly NSFW so I'm going to skip scanning this week.  (Sorry to the one or two people who follow this blog.)  I'm still set on pushing through the anatomy lessons.

My goal is to be able to draw a consistent body type in multiple poses sans-reference material.  It's a pretty hard limitation right now that I can only finish a passable drawing if I lean heavily on resource material.  So far I haven't found any good advice / tutorials / books on how to get over that wall but I'll definitely make not of it when I figure it out.

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Metrics

Pages Read This Week	0
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1450
Books Completed Since Launch	13
Total Tutorial Run-time	12 hours 32 minutes
Days Since Launch	113
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	108
Drawing Time This Week	6 hours
Drawing Time Total	109 hours 54 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.

Day 106: Week 16 Summary

I promise, I'm not actually trying to write a blog on how not to be successful at writing / drawing comics.  I've just run into a rough patch with work, club activities, and other projects I have going on.

A lot of the time I put on the clock this week was devoted to doing mock ups for a future t-shirt design, so I'm planning to post those after an official version is released.  The rest of the time I had to drop into basic warm up routines.

Learning how to draw isn't like learning how to write a bike, at least for me.  I found that my lines aren't as clean and I'm having a hard time drawing what I see right in front of me after taking so much time off to beef up my digital skill set.  I guess that's why they always preach about doing things in moderation.

I'm planning to get back to fill up a page for most days moving forward.  There's still a lot of reading I want to get into, but I'm going to focus on the art side more for the time being.

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Metrics

Pages Read This Week	0
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1450
Books Completed Since Launch	13
Total Tutorial Run-time	12 hours 37 minutes
Days Since Launch	106
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	102
Drawing Time This Week	7 hours
Drawing Time Total	103 hours 54 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.

Day 99: Week 15 Summary

So, I ended up taking one more minor detour into digital art this week.  One of the guys from my club let me borrow his Wacom stylus so I could play around with some of the apps available on my iPad.  It was pretty hit or miss with some apps having serious delay issues and others causing the input to skip all over the place.

For now the best I can accomplish using those tools is a really rough layout or thumbnail, which is still really convenient.  I'm leaning more towards one of the round tip stylus though since I couldn't notice a great deal of pressure sensitivity in my apps.

I managed to get a few sketches of different takes on samurai for this Japanese style drawing I want to complete in the next few weeks.  A lot of the really cool styles I found were done with brushes so I'm hoping at least a few of my calligraphy pens can still write.  When I was still working on my kanji drills that particular style of pen/brush was constantly drying out on me.

The goal for the next week is to experiment a little with different pens and brushes I have laying around.  I'd also like to knock out some anatomy drills to help with positioning my thumbnails so it doesn't take as much work to correct when I'm adding details later on.

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Metrics

Pages Read This Week	244
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1450
Books Completed Since Launch	13
Total Tutorial Run-time	12 hours 15 minutes
Days Since Launch	99
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	96
Drawing Time This Week	7 hours
Drawing Time Total	97 hours 54 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.

Day 95: Doug Hills' "Manga Studio for Dummies"

Quick Overview

Level:	Beginner'ish
Pages:	384
Published:	2008
Arbitrary Rating:	4/5
Plan to Reread:	Yes

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I'm not dead, really.  I've been working my way through Manga Studio for Dummies and trying to walk through the menus at the same time.  The short books with chapters dedicated to paper and pencils types were kind of low hanging fruit, so from here on out it's going to be pretty difficult to start and finish a book in the same week.  Scheduling notes aside, on to the review.

I'm actually a fan of the "For Dummies" franchise.  I've used several of their books to pass advanced IT certification exams.  Don't let the title fool you though.  These books often start off really slow and then dump tons of information on you.  This one was no exception to that pattern.  It would have been nice if they skipped over the guide for opening a new file (Click file, click new) or saving a file (click file, click save).

When you get through the really low level introduction the guide provides a number of useful shortcuts and recommendations that I've found extremely useful.  For example, my Wacom tablet doesn't allow me to rotate the screen.  When I use the twist gesture it gives me the rotate icon, but the page stays still.  I found the hot key Shift + Space bar and mouse or stylus to rotate reading through one of the early chapters.

If I had to break it down, I'd say 30% or so common knowledge, 40% I could apply right away, and the remaining material is just out of my league at this point.  So I plan to revisit this book in the future to lock down all the useful tips I can.

Day 92: Week 14 Summary

When I first started this blog I wasn't expecting to go on some cliche journey of self-discovery but here I am.  I've discovered that the years of honing my mind to retain ridiculous amounts of IT trivia for college and certification exams translates very poorly to any kind of creative project.  Even worse, my methods of studying and retaining information aren't especially effective for acquiring and improving new skills.

The good news (for me anyways) is that the need to research and find answers does carry over in many ways.  For example, it's been easy for me to memorize the hot keys that are available in Manga Studio which has really helped my digital work flow.

I've also picked up several warm ups, exercises, and a kind of road map from where I am to where I want to be in the future.  Nsio has the best explanation that I've found so far.  He breaks down the fundamental skills, the level they're obtained, and how they're combined to produce high level works.  Check out his "Learning Order" tutorial to see what I'm talking about.  Fair warning though, if you start to browse around outside of his tutorials folder you're going to find some very NSFW content.

I didn't make nearly as much headway on this as I was expecting.  I imported one of my sketches from week 7 into Inkscape to clean up the lines.  It worked really well on the boy because I had gone over his lines several times to make them stand out.  Parts of the girl ended up whited out and I had to fudge them back in after I moved it to Manga Studio.  I'm intending those colors to be the my flats, but I'm not sure how much more time I want to dump into this one image before I move on.

For what it's worth, this was my first attempt at digital art since Mario Paint.

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Metrics

Pages Read This Week	36
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1206
Books Completed Since Launch	12
Total Tutorial Run-time	11 hours 46 minutes
Days Since Launch	92
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	89
Drawing Time This Week	7 hours 5 minutes
Drawing Time Total	90 hours 54 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.