It’s been a pretty good week, overall. I got a good haul of books. Ladies on Top is turning out really well, and still no mention of the simple premise that Mitsuki could ride Shinomiya cowboy, somehow. I’m happy for Marin, and I hope we get to see more of them. Crazy Food Truck had a disappointing ending. Like, not the ending itself, though it comes too soon, but the other part. If you know, you know. Helck continues to be a wonderful surprise for me, really looking forward to the rest of that story. Shy is amazing, especially since I have not been enjoying My Hero Academia since the hospital story. Seriously, if Deku is your baby, then you should go meet his sister, Teru.
This week has also been a trying one for me as an artist. I got started on my digital process for my next book, and I’m not making the progress I want to be making right out of the gate. It’s a whole different beast than traditional media, so it takes me a second to transition. I’m sure I’ll be rocking and rolling next week, when I get used to the process. To expand a bit, I draw my comics in traditional media first and then scan it into the computer to finish up. In the past, I tried seeing if I could digitize the picture itself so I could color it directly, but I couldn’t get it to work like I wanted, so instead I trace over everything and then color and letter it. I do all this at like 200% zoom, because the smooth screen makes it hard for me to draw at a similar scale as the paper.
That’s, of course, because I have dysgraphia. For those unfamiliar, that’s like dyslexia for handwriting. If I focus and write “slowly,” I have a child’s handwriting, and normally it’s illegible. Like, I usually only know what I wrote because I remember writing it. My fine motor control isn’t great in general. I can spend an hour cutting vegetables for dinner, and chop sticks are fully out. When I was a kid, that also gave me trouble when I drew, because I’d have to brute force my pencil as hard as I could to get any kind of line control, and it still looked terrible. I literally can’t draw a straight line to save my life. But then I learned how to draw differently, in that sketch style that I could probably name if I had gotten any formal art education. I really like where my art has gotten to at this point, and I’m looking forward to how it’ll grow in the future. There are a lot of little things I need to learn about, like easier ways to do perspective and how to draw cars and buildings.
So, one part of why digital is harder for me is because the screen is smoother than paper. I got a “paper feel” screen protector, and it doesn’t help much. It kinda feels like paper to the touch, but the stylus is still a smooth, plastic stylus, and it glides right over. I rely on the friction between the pencil and paper to help maintain my line control. When you’re drawing on paper, you’re carving shapes out of a sheet, whereas digital is just making a mark on a plane. No resistance to keep me and my shaky fingers in check. I can trace over the pencil drawing easily enough, because, perhaps strangely, I still have good hand-eye coordination and can follow directions like that. It’s trying to make any mark free hand in digital that gives me trouble.
What attracts me most to digital work at the moment is color and lettering. I actually did hand letter a book once, and it was a mess. I was literally cutting out word balloons and taping them to the page. It’s not sustainable and looked pretty rough. For books I make myself, I’ll always be doing lettering digitally, no matter what, so I can have a legible comic. The colors in digital are also really attractive, for their smoothness, evenness, and the wide range of options I have at my disposal. I know I’ve been working in black, white, and grey, so I don’t overload my home printed books with heavy, wet ink that shows through on the other side, but I won’t always be working with those limited resources. And even there, I don’t have that many distinct shades of grey available to me in colored pencils at the moment. The overall smooth, polished feel the digital art has compared to what I can currently produce traditionally is really attractive. Once I learn more and figure out what all I can accomplish with Affinity, I’m sure there are a lot more advantages to working digitally that I’m not considering right now. Like, I keep seeing videos of people coloring in wide swaths across the screen and it only affecting the space in the lines? What I really want is for someone to teach me how to use this thing like I’ve never opened a computer before, top to bottom, because I won’t understand it otherwise.
So now I’m starting this process, and I’m considering a few things. First is whether I should try steaming further ahead with digital at all, or if it would be worth my while trying out more traditional media and figuring out how I can make the art I want without opening up the laptop. I think there’s a lot more for me to discover there, and with the right tools, I probably could find something satisfying that way. Of course, I also want to make more digital native art, to see if I’m really cut out for it in the way I want. Like, with more underdrawings, maybe I could overcome my issues with linework on a computer screen. No matter the result, it’ll be a good experience that I’ll learn from. I’m aware that I can do both, and I want to, it’s just that my brain immediately goes to the extreme end, where I have to make a choice. I will one day have to make these choices, project by project, even if not for my whole career.
The other big thing I’m learning from this project is that I’m playing against my type. I wanted to draw this book in a particular style that I developed and designed the characters in, a more realistic style that I refined from previous work that I still found easy enough to draw. And for illustrations and individual pictures, it is fine and works well. Working on this book has really driven it home for me how different practice is from reality. It just doesn’t work out the same on the page, and I’m realizing just how much the style doesn’t do what I want it to do. I can play more to my strengths with a more cartoony style, and that’ll end up looking more consistent and organic on the page. I’m always attracted to the more realistic side of things, because I like art that looks polished and detailed. I want people to see my art and think an adult made it, not a kid who can barely keep a pen still. A more realistic style also fits more serious narratives, and would help me get recognized as someone making art that everyone should be reading and taking seriously. But you know what? I want to make art that only I can make, and I want to stop being self-conscious about my handiwork. My lines are wild and variable and elastic; I should be making those sorts of forms with them.
And there are a lot of things I really like about this new book. I started using a different process for sizing and spacing characters on the page that’s much looser, which is really helpful. I only got out my ruler for the kissing scenes, and only then for the geometric perfection of their heads. That’s a huge step for me in general, and it removes a roadblock that was keeping me from working more in digital. I tried a lot of little things that I’ve wanted to in the past that turned out well. I’m learning a lot about my choice of moment, and I’m already thinking of ways I can give myself a challenge where I make choices that are less about literal cause-and-effect storytelling. And scriptwriting is a place of growth for me here. It’s illuminating to write a script that you know has to be drawn a certain way, and that’ll be helpful whether I continue to make my own books or if I decide to do more on the writer side of things. So yeah, overall a good week for books, I’d say.
Life in the Gutters 