Read, Watch, Draw

Friday, July 15, 2016

Day 197: Hiatus Pt. 2

Just a quick note to let people know I haven't disappeared. The break is really helping me with my focus. I've been able to knock out a plot structure book that's been on my read list for months now. The notes I took are already helping to stream line my script writing process.

After I get back from my business trip I'll be able to set down at the drawing desk with fresh eyes and some renewed motivation. One piece of advice I can give at this point is to make sure you have some fun while you're drawing. If you get too hung up on dedicated studies and singling out your weak spots it can be pretty soul crushing. I'm definitely adding that to my list of things not to do in the future.


Pages Read This Week	240
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1760
Books Completed Since Launch	14
Total Tutorial Run-time	14 hours 33 minutes
Days Since Launch	197
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	164
Drawing Time This Week	20 minutes
Drawing Time Total	160 hours 35 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.

Friday, July 1, 2016

Day 183: Hiatus

I'm taking a temporary break from the blogging and daily goals. It's not like I got tired of drawing after six months. I just reached the point where this schedule and format puts unnecessary limits on what I'm trying to do. I mean, it's hard to sit down and write out a script if I only have a finite amount of spare time and a chunk of it is sectioned off to aimlessly copying muscle structures and random perspective tutorials.

The plan for the time being is to dump as much time as I need to into breathing some life into an original project that I can use to drive my progress over the current plateau I'm stuck on. I'm still tracking time on my spreadsheet, it's just collecting a lot more big fat zeroes now that days are being chucked at plot structure and character development. Hopefully it will pay off big, so stay tuned. Or not, you can always catch up later when this blog is moving again.

Friday, June 24, 2016

Day 176: Week 26 Summary

This week turned out to be a little chaotic. I had to take a few breaks from the perception training exercises in "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". It's really hard for me to qualify the book because on one hand I can see why it's so highly recommended by artists and on the other I can see why reviews become more mixed when you look at popular ranking sites like Goodreads.

The first exercise was to draw the two opposing faces in profile. It might be hard to recognize in my own drawing below, but it's the wonky looking chess piece on the top of the page. This drill was pretty neat and I tried it several times throughout he week to see how far I could draw the faces before I started drawing the chalice.

The next exercise was to draw an upside down copy of the famous squiggly line guy. This was particularly hard for me because I have already honed my ability to draw the things I'm looking at by recognizing what I'm looking at. Making the subject confusing by flipping it upside down was supposed to trick my brain into focusing on the simple details like distance and curvature of the lines. Instead I ended up rapidly losing scale and proportion throughout the squiggles. The end result wasn't awful, but I feel confident it would have turned out much better if the source wasn't inverted.

I stumbled a bit on that chapter and decided to doodle to remind myself that I am drawing for a hobby to have something that I enjoy doing in my spare time. If you're noticing a quality drop it's because I'm trying to shift to drawing from memory or imagination and not from observation.

I'm also working up a character redesign for the next club meeting, so my attention is really scattered right now. From Monday I'm going to try to get back to nailing down at least one chapter a day from the book so I can narrow my goals down a bit.


Pages Read This Week	18
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1520
Books Completed Since Launch	13
Total Tutorial Run-time	14 hours 33 minutes
Days Since Launch	176
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	164
Drawing Time This Week	7 hours 10 minutes
Drawing Time Total	160 hours 15 minutes

Friday, June 17, 2016

Day 169: Week 25 Summary

I started reading through the opening part of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain so I could hit the ground running for next week. It's not exactly what I expected. Especially since the author says that it's less of a book on art and more of a book on perception. The first three chapters are text heavy explanations of the theories that are the foundation for this approach to drawing.

It's very interesting to read and I am keeping an open mind about the whole left vs right brain idea. The idea of being able to zone out and cut off my logical processes, even temporarily, would be a huge help for me. I tend to over analyze and critique my own work mid-process which makes completing exercises more time consuming than they should be.

The closest I think I've gotten to this approach on my own is when I've veeb listening to music and droning my way through gesture practice sessions. During those exercises I stop thinking about the specifics of the image I'm observing or the outcome of the finished drawing and I just go through the motions. I can relate to some of the testimonies in the book, because I have been surprised by my own work when I drop out of critical observation mode and just draw.

I knocked out some anatomy sketches and a few Pokemon doodles for my daughter, but nothing really interesting this week. I will be starting the more interesting drills tomorrow. I'm also working on a side project, trying to work up some character designs for a short strip. I'm hoping to have something worth sharing for that in the next week or two.


Pages Read This Week	46
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1502
Books Completed Since Launch	13
Total Tutorial Run-time	14 hours 33 minutes
Days Since Launch	169
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	157
Drawing Time This Week	6 hours
Drawing Time Total	153 hours 5 minutes

Friday, June 10, 2016

Day 162: Week 24 Summary

Let's just say that with all the travel prep, packing, and family visits that's happened I'm surprised I even had a chance to look at a pencil. Things will be picking up on the 15th. (Yes, I know I sound like a broken record.)

My work area looks like something out of a war documentary right now, so it really needs some TLC before go time. Other than that everything is prepped and ready to go. The materials are on standby and my motivation is stoked


Pages Read This Week	0
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1456
Books Completed Since Launch	13
Total Tutorial Run-time	14 hours 33 minutes
Days Since Launch	162
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	150
Drawing Time This Week	3 hours
Drawing Time Total	147 hours 5 minutes

Friday, June 3, 2016

Day 155: Week 23 Summary

There's nothing too exciting or new to report. I've been doing a lot of research on universities with art programs that I can dump the last of my GI Bill into before the funds expire. The only problem is that I can't get the full benefits unless I attend classes face to face, which limits me to after work hour courses.

That hasn't been working out so hot for me, so I'm now digging around for on line courses so I can at least get 50% of the housing benefits and I'll just try to max out on the courses I can take to get lots of books and instruction time.

In the meantime, I'm still doing family practice with my daughter. She's shifted from inking my lines to coloring them so that's been fun. I've laid the groundwork for the next few books I'll be tackling. For now I just have to keep my hands limber and enjoy as much time with the family as I can until I drop them off at the airport.

Things should get much more interesting on here after that.


Pages Read This Week	0
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1456
Books Completed Since Launch	13
Total Tutorial Run-time	13 hours 23 minutes
Days Since Launch	155
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	147
Drawing Time This Week	6 hours
Drawing Time Total	144 hours 5 minutes

Friday, May 27, 2016

Day 148: Week 22 Summary

This was a pretty successful week for getting back to the basics and honing my pencil and paper skills. An added bonus for me was that my daughter has made drawing with me part of our nightly routine before she goes to bed.

We usually just draw pictures from the comics that are laying around. There's also been a few tutorials on YouTube that helped us turn out a pretty sweet Robonyan and SD Deadpool. I'd put up scans of those but they ended up crumbled up in one of her toy boxes. She likes to take the finished drawings to bed when we're done so I haven't had a lot of luck scanning them.

That being said, it's still great practice. I'm a little bummed out that she's gotten interested now when she's leaving the country to visit her grandparents in a few weeks. I haven't had any luck lining up my art classes at the local community college so I'm laying the ground work to roll through the lessons included in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. If the testimonials in the workbook are real, there should be tons of cool work to post when I finish up with that.


Pages Read This Week	0
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1456
Books Completed Since Launch	13
Total Tutorial Run-time	13 hours 23 minutes
Days Since Launch	148
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	141
Drawing Time This Week	7 hours
Drawing Time Total	138 hours 5 minutes

Friday, May 20, 2016

Day 141: Week 21 Summary

I had another "last man standing" kind of week. First my daughter got a fever, then my son got an ear infection, then my wife had a turn at the fever. So far I've managed to avoid the bug that's going around but picking up the extra slack around the house ate into my drawing time.

The time I did come by I used to work on gesture drawings and some Yokai watch doodles for my daughter. It does make me wonder what kind of witch craft you have to know to make colored pencils look good. Even the expensive ones I have are just a small step above crayons. The combination of their waxy tips and the grain of my paper makes it nearly impossible to get a smooth consistent color anywhere.

Probably my main motivation for doing this whole drawing bit this late in life is because I want to at least try to spark an interest in my own kids while they are still young. I fell in love with comics and drawing thanks to my dad drawing my favorite characters, so I'd really like to pass that on.

I don't really have any big goals for the upcoming week, just going to keep putting in the time for now. I think my daughter wants me to draw Pikachu next so I'll probably play around with that a bit.


Pages Read This Week	0
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1456
Books Completed Since Launch	13
Total Tutorial Run-time	12 hours 52 minutes
Days Since Launch	141
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	134
Drawing Time This Week	5 hours
Drawing Time Total	131 hours 5 minutes

Monday, May 16, 2016

Day 137: Libbie Hawker's "Take Off Your Pants!: Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing"


Level:	Intermediate
Pages:	108
Published:	2015
Arbitrary Rating:	4/5
Plan to Reread:	Yes

It's been a crazy long time since I could sit down and read through a book. I snagged the kindle version of Libbie Hawker's "Take Off Your Pants!: Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing" while it was on sale earlier and it's just the right length to get through in a single setting.

One thing I've noticed going through all these how-to guides is that the books that focus on writing have been much easier to read. I'm not just talking about better formatting and layout. These books have been genuinely more enjoyable to flip through even when I'm not taking notes. I guess that says a lot about what learning to write can do for your writing style.

Libbie's book has a bit of the "Anyone can do it, trust me" jazz that you find in most how-to books. It's blended in with some legitimate good advice though, so I don't really consider it a negative this time around. I may come back and do a follow up post for this book after I've had the chance to apply the outline scheme to one of my own stories.

If you're interested in writing, don't know where to start, or find yourself getting lost in tangled character developments then this book would probably be a good read for you. Some people hate on applying any kind of formula to the creative process. Even if you decide that planning ahead doesn't work for your writing method it's still a worthwhile read just to see where other writer's are likely coming from.

Friday, May 13, 2016

Day 134: Week 20 Summary

I managed to squeeze in a quick e-book on outlining stories, finished Saga Vol 1 and Gotham Academy Vol 1. That's a pretty successful week for me as far as reading goes. I had to play around a bit more with my final t-shirt design but mostly this week was back to mechanical pencils and working through reams of printer paper.

I'm very slowly working my way through Matt Groening's "The Simpsons Handbook: Secret Tips from the Pros". The plan is to draw every picture in the book at least once and add my own notes along the way. Sure, it's a bit of a deviation from the anatomy studies I've been working on but it's just fun to draw something that looks like it's supposed to look.

I'm still planning to start my web comic on January 1st, I so I need to understand how to design a character that's easily drawn and looks consistent from panel to panel. Matt's book is fantastic for this, I just wish more animators would release handbooks like this one.


Pages Read This Week	162
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1618
Books Completed Since Launch	14
Total Tutorial Run-time	12 hours 52 minutes
Days Since Launch	134
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	129
Drawing Time This Week	7 hours 5 minutes
Drawing Time Total	126 hours 5 minutes

Friday, May 6, 2016

Day 127: Week 19 Summary

This week wraps up the final version for my panel on the club t-shirt. I'm still playing around with an alternate version that has a single focus to make better use of the limited print size, but at least now there's no looming deadline.

One thing this proved to me is that application is worth a million times more than theory when it comes to art. The process I worked out in my head didn't go anywhere near as smoothly as I thought. I ended up making the same mistake a lot of the tutorial hosts I follow make switching to the wrong layer and having touch ups where they weren't supposed to be.

During the filling process I found out that Manga Studio's edge sense isn't too keen on gray toned drawings. So every time I tried to add whites or background colors it would eat up some of my line thickness. I tried to auto correct it using the line correction tool, but it had the same problem. Some lines would blow up to four or five times the original size and other lines wouldn't change at all.

I need to either spend more time darkening my lines or figure out how to get a threshold setting on my scanner that gives me dark lines without turning the page brown. If I had done that up front I probably would have shaved several hours off this project.

Left is the original pencil work (Pentel Graph Gear 1000 w/ .7 lead with Col-Erase base lines). I scanned and removed some of the noise before importing it into Manga Studio and shifting the hue to make it easier to work over.

I was going for an ukiyo-e look for the clouds to give my panel a different feel from the sci-fi and noir styles I'd already seen in some of the other submissions. I had the option to break the bottom panel, but ended up staying in the frame. When I dropped the lower guy's elbow and extended the spear butt off the bottom it didn't look as good on paper as it did in my head.

More inks and background. I didn't like a solid black field on the bottom, so I copied the long cloud on top and inverted the colors. I'm not sure if it looks like a shadow or a river, but I was aiming for shadow.

Looks like Read, Watch, Draw has passed the 1k page view milestone! Thanks to all the early viewers who are putting up with the low quality posts and wonky writing style. It kind of snuck up on me so I don't have one of those snazzy thank you pin ups. I'll work on having one ready for when we hit the 5k mark.


Pages Read This Week	0
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1456
Books Completed Since Launch	13
Total Tutorial Run-time	12 hours 52 minutes
Days Since Launch	127
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	122
Drawing Time This Week	8 hours
Drawing Time Total	119 hours

Friday, April 29, 2016

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.


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

Friday, April 22, 2016

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.


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

Friday, April 15, 2016

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.


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

Friday, April 8, 2016

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.


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

Monday, April 4, 2016

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


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

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.

Friday, April 1, 2016

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.


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

Friday, March 25, 2016

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:

Prepare draft work in traditional a medium (i.e. pencil / paper)
Scan and manipulate that image to reduce the amount of noise that might be picked up around the lines.
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.
Import that into your art program of choice, in my case Manga Studio.
Create a base layer under it, an ink layer over it, a separate layer for each base color in the design.
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.


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

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Day 83: Tutorials by Will Terrel

Will's channel is another one that I stumbled on years ago, subscribed, and then promptly forgot about while I focused on school and starting my family. His humble approach to drawing and loose sketch work is what caught my attention back then. It's still a great thing now that I've been drowning myself in the epic works of artists who have been at it longer than I've been alive.

For starters I checked out his video on how to get out of a drawing funk. Mainly because I am in kind of a funk of my own right now. Learning Manga Studio was a convenient reason to put down the pencil and get a breather, but I've still got that worry in the back of my mind. Am I going to get better? How much time is that going to take? Everyone says it takes years or even decades, but how much of that is spent in the "No one can ever know I drew this," phase?

Taking a day to fill up a whole sketch book seems insane to me. In a good day I can fill up two or three pages. Maybe. I've still got a lot of work to get comfortable with the idea that a practice drawing can be bad and that's ok.

Will's video on 5 tips for better drawings has some more practical advice, like drawing lightly during the sketching phase, turning the paper to see your mistakes better, and practicing to get confident smooth lines.

That part kills me. I did those choppy awful lines for probably the first ten or so years that I was drawing. If Youtube and the internet in general had been a bigger thing back in the 80's I could have found someone to tell me not to do that. Live and learn, right?

Friday, March 18, 2016

Day 78: Week 12 Summary

This is a pretty unspectacular way to wrap up three months of daily practice, but here it is. I've knocked out several hours of Manga Studio tutorials and I finally have a beginner's grasp on what some of the tools are and how to use them. I even figured out some of the hot keys for things that I plan to use often.

Still stuck on configuring my Wacom tablet to actually use all of the buttons and clickers on the stylus but that's my next goal. Well, that and importing some of my own sketches to ink and color. It's still tedious and painfully slow to do anything 100% digitally. It's hard jut to draw a recognizable oval. But I read that there's supposed to be tools for that in MS if I can figure out where they are hidden.

My first attempt at a full script is on it's third re-write. I think I put too much emphasis on the cool idea between the plot and left the characters bland and interchangeable.


Pages Read This Week	24
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1170
Books Completed Since Launch	12
Total Tutorial Run-time	8 hours 17 minutes
Days Since Launch	78
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	77
Drawing Time This Week	7 hours 15 minutes
Drawing Time Total	78 hours 49 minutes