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.

---

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.