I have finished up the pencils for my remake of Bet Your Sweet Bottom! This includes a back cover I’m very excited about. I’ve never made a back cover before, and I think I did something really cool with it. So now I’ve gotten it all scanned in, and I’ve broken ground on the digital processing. It’s slower going at the moment because I had a stressful few days at work, which left me pretty wiped.
I’m also running into the familiar problem I always face when I draw digitally, that my art doesn’t have a particular quality I want. Every time I see it up close and see the new digital lines, it looks sloppier than I want. I see all this great, polished art everywhere, and I want that for myself. And while there are certainly things I can do to improve my own quality, and I can point to some roughness my computer experiences due to its specs and age, I know there’s very little I can actually do to accomplish the kind of line art that I wish I had. I have dysgraphia, so my lines are always going to be uneven and inconsistent. Especially on a computer screen, which is so smooth and gives me no resistance to brace the pen against. I also chose to do this in a particular way, based on experience and the tools available, that leaves me with the most affected lines. On the one hand, I am genuinely starting to like seeing art that looks like I drew it with my own hands; but on the other hand, I can’t stop wanting for my art to have that stellar, rock-solid smoothness and finely controlled variability that I find so impressive in other people’s art. Just seeing someone draw a straight line looks like magic to me.
Of course, it’s always what you can’t have. Also, a lot of this is a reaction to the fact that when I work in digital, I have the screen zoomed in to 150% at minimum, often much higher, and no one’s art looks good that way. I know it’ll look better when it’s at scale.
Another aspect of this that I’ve never been able to tackle is that I’m near sighted. I have bifocal lenses because my eyes have a hard time readjusting from close to long vision, but I never use the bifocals. Maybe they’re not calibrated right, but certainly I’ve always been more comfortable and can see a lot better when I just take them off. For one, I wouldn’t have to worry about having a smaller area of view and blurry surroundings that distract me. I’ve just never been all that comfortable or able to draw or do anything with focus while wearing my glasses. That means I’m always nose right up against the page, with my long, gangly arms crooked out to the sides, where I can’t use my elbow or shoulder as effectively. I have gotten better about using them, but I have to imagine that I would be much better able to use them if I gave myself some distance between my torso and the table. That would at least help with the larger motions and allow me to work without stressing my back as much, especially now that I’m going to be using larger paper more often. I need new glasses, anyway; these are a few years old, and they’re covered in scratches.
A new laptop, printer, and scanner are all greatly needed. The computer part is just me being reminded once more that having to wait through bugginess caused by my computer not having as much RAM as Affinity likes is annoying and slows me down. The print shop needs are because Office Depot is terrible. I had a lot of trouble getting their old machines to work with my USB, and it’s such a hassle starting and stopping transactions all the time while you work it out. The scanner had lines on the page? Like, that’s something you can say about a printer leaving streaks, but this is the first time I ever saw a scanner with streaks. I don’t have options locally for dedicated print shops, or at least better serviced ones, so I could really use my own equipment.
I’ve been feeling pretty good the past few weeks, working on this book. It’s great having something to work on, to be making comics. I was right, there’s no reason I shouldn’t have been doing this the whole time. Why was I insisting I had to be “ready” to start doing anything? I’ve gotten up at five a few times, like what my alarm is set to, and I was drawing before I went to work. It felt really accomplished. That’s not been very consistent, because it’s still five in the morning, and daylight savings time has wrecked the progress I made with getting up on time. I will say, though, I need to figure out a better balance with the rest of my life when I’m making a comic, if I’m going to be doing it more often. I haven’t cooked anything in a while, and eventually I need to take out the trash and do dishes. The latter two haven’t been huge problems because I’m not cooking, and so I haven’t made as much trash or dishes. I need to take time to pick up, though. I’ll run out of frozen chili eventually.
I’ve also been thinking about other projects, because creativity always strikes for everything except what you’re working on. I had a great new idea for my martial arts adventure story that will be a great visual and help track progress. I also had some inspiration for my magical girl story that will revitalize it and, I think, bring it a lot closer to the finish line. It’s really invigorating to have stories flowing for you, and it’s good for progress on my graphic novel project because I got to places in those other projects that I’d have to plan out a lot more lore, plot, and arcs than I can easily do at the moment. It’ll be very soon that I want to escape those back into the far more developed story I want to focus on next. To be an artist…
Weekly Art Blog 3/9-3/16-2025
Life in the Gutters 