Weekly Art Blog 6/15-6/22/2025

I have finished the first chapter and have started onto the second chapter of my zine series. It’s starting to get really, really hot around here, so I need to figure out the adjustments needed to sleep well and stay hydrated, because I forget every year and I am very tired all the time. I am also anticipating a hard week ahead at work because we missed two trucks, which means two extra truckloads of freight loaded onto this week’s trucks. So, great time for me to be doing heavy lifting with my brain. It’ll be fine. Attached is a barista.

The opening scene in this chapter is a talking scene, so I’m once again doing some layout redesigns. When I was in my planning stage, it was easy for me to accept what a talking scene means. There’s no getting around the fact that there will be a lot of face panels, you know? I did plan some more diverse ones in the mix, but in the end, I was like, we all know what’s coming. And then I go to draw them, and it’s still too much two people talking. So now I know why in manga, in talking scenes, there’s panels of the restaurant, or looking up at the sky, or literally anything and anyone else besides the characters talking inserted into the scene. There’s visual diversity for the audience, sure, but it’s immediately less boring to draw. Probably also explains the shonen manga tradition of people talking during fight scenes. Sure, it’s almost always dialogue that could and probably should happen in a separate conversation outside of the fight, but you want to both save time and not be bored drawing a talking scene. The readers don’t mind stretching the limits of how time actually works when juggling the actions and the words together. So yeah, I’m going to keep it in mind when planning my next comic.

I’m very tired here. I’ve been staring at this screen for a while, unable to come up with a topic to write about. If I lean my head back a little, I’ll start falling asleep. I spent the whole week drained. Part of the reason why layout redesigns were a big thing for me; it’s a lot of mental work when I don’t have that much mental room to work. Decisions are some of the most difficult things I do on a regular basis, and it’s been a lot of decisions lately. I like comics because they allow me to break up decisions and types of decisions into discrete chunks that I do at different times; doubling back to an old decision isn’t the desired outcome. Even typing this up, I was thinking I was going to write a whole thing about decision fatigue, but I don’t have it in me. There’s not a lot to say, you know? They’re hard, and my brain is always on a lag, so I’m always second-guessing and processing as I’m carrying out the decision. It’s a lot of work at a time when I’m trying not to take a nap. I think I’m going to call it here for today, because I wasn’t really thinking that hard all week.