Weekly Art Blog 6/23-6/29/24

I have been really vibing this week creatively. Last week, I said that I wanted to plan out this comic strip I’m working on, so that I would know what’s going to happen and I can crank it out. As I sat there, struggling to put together ideas and talking on here about how much easier it is to draw comics, I decided to just go for it. I have five strips drawn and ready to go right now, and so much of what this is going to be has become way more apparent to me as a result. It’s like how Breaking Bad was originally gonna have Jesse Pinkman die in the first season, and then they realized what the show actually was when they saw the actors together; sometimes, you can’t tell what you’re actually making until you make it. It’s also such a contrast, between the planning process to drawing. Writing is all about big ideas and keeping all your details in order, and everything is daunting and never finished and intellectualized either just on or past the border with fun. It’s so much easier to know what’s next when I draw it. Artist-first comics, you know? It’s the natural way. It’s starting to make sense (like, a tiny bit) how serialized mangaka can keep up with their schedules.

At the same time, I’ve been drawing these strips in a different way than normal. As I’m writing this, I realize I don’t know exactly how to describe what I’ve been doing because I don’t have the vocabulary for this simple thing, so bear with me. There’s that sketchy way you draw where you double over with your lines as you draw, probably called sketching? I decided not to do that in pen, like I have been. I’m just tracing over in one take. With my dysgraphia, sketching is the most effective way to get clear lines, at least in pencil. Pen, often not so much. It can be a struggle to get the pens to keep up and maintain any sense of consistent line weight. I was looking at my doodles in my notebook and decided that I wanted my art in this strip to look like it was made by my hands, you know? I’m tracing over pencils anyway, so it’s not from scratch chicken scratch, and I can fix simple mistakes in digital. I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit. I’m still insecure about lines not coming out fully smooth or straight, but not because I think it looks bad. Maybe it’s not the “smart thing” in this internet and comics industry, where to make it as an artist I’m expected to audition as a wunderkind for the Big Two, but I don’t want to draw for them, anyway. I want to make my books, with my art, with my sensibilities. And if we’re being honest, all things being equal, this looks as good or better; I wasn’t doing anything that required the smoothness or control I was failing to achieve before. It’s really nice to see my natural linework in a comic.

So yeah, I’ve got a lot of comics ready to go for when I launch this series. I’ll keep working on it while I have this momentum and excitement. My goal is to glaze the strips before publishing them, so that I have at least a modicum of protection in this new AI landscape. That means I’m now waiting for Cara’s WebGlaze extension to get sorted out. I would kill my computer trying to use it to finish up these strips and then glaze them for like sixteen hours apiece; I’d never be able to turn it off longer than a restart. I’ll certainly be able to publish one a week for a few weeks, at least, by the time it’s all ready. I’m very excited by all of this, and you should be, too. I’m looking forward to showing this series off to the world.

On another note, I realized the other day that when I picture something in my head, I’m not picturing it in a particular art style. It’s not like a drawing in my head, but it’s also not a real life image. It’s just the idea of an image. Like, I realized how literally I was taking it when we shorthand a person in a story thinking of an idea by showing the literal image in their head. Maybe some people are able to literally visually see an image in their art style before they make it? Maybe? I don’t think so? I’m starting to think that’s not necessarily the case for anyone, and certainly most people. To paint a picture, I took an image I was thinking of, and I realized that if I picked up part of it, nothing was there, and it was like on the back was just a set description. As if it were a piece of paper that said [a person’s arm] to act as a stand-in but I actually saw a person’s arm. When you “see something in your head,” you don’t actually see anything, you just have flashes of the idea of blue and square and lighting, and that feels the same as seeing it, but there’s nothing “there.” And no, I don’t smoke weed, or anything, because I’m boring.