Half monthly report
It's been a bit of a slow start for me despite my massive momentum, juggling other life stuff and sorting thing out.
I'm averaging 5 hours a day so still high but not epic level high.
Also I had an ill patch where I didn't draw for a couple of days at all, laid up in bed. Was dreadful for the artist in me :/
I finished off my first set of random manga pages. I'm probably not aiming for 1000 of these, more 1000 rough layouts, but ideally I still need to get a high number out otherwise it's not realistic to think that I could manage a weekly manga.
There is no shading on this set, that's partly because I wanted to produce an example quality that was easy enough to repeat for the manga project that I'm working on at the moment. But the next sets will have shading because that's good practice. I'll probably try out different types of shading and copy other artist's styles to get a hang of what I'm doing.
So without shading, the total time taken to make a manga page at this consistent quality is 3 hours 9 minutes average. I'm hoping that I will pick up speed as I get used to drawing stuff and also as my style stabilises further, because really I want it to be lower than that. I know it's difficult but I've always liked a good challenge :P
I'm thinking upgrading my workflow will give the best performance improvement, but without my art skill being higher it wont be able to handle it :P
I'm working a lot on resolved sketches at the moment, and this is forcing me to finalise details and proportions, something which I am not too used to. It's very good practice and it's giving me a lot of things to work on, in some ways it's helping to shape my own style. It's also very good practice for my manga pages as this is a necessary step to increase the detail and accuracy level in preparation for inking.
One major difference is that there are backgrounds in quite a few (less than half still but getting there) of the sketches now. This is good practice and it's getting me used to doing proper work outside my comfort zone.
Overall this stage has improved quality and proportions, as well as a lot more detail which I am trying to add, like props and items, as well as BG.
And partly because of the added detail, and also because I putting more effort into this stage rather than just winging it, the time per sketch has gone up massively to 30 minutes. Slightly annoying but since I am putting more time into my art lately it's not really an issue, but I'm hoping it will speed up again soon.
Another skill that has improved is my ability to fix up the concept even at the resolve stage. Part of my masterplan involves cutting out unnecessary steps and so it's good to see that I can adjust sketches at this late stage. Really the issue is that sketches, even at the same level, have a variance of quality, and some are good enough to be resolved straight away and others need improvement first. I dont think this can be helped, some days you just have a good flow or a good idea and that will make the sketch stand on it's own. other times you're tired or whatever and your sketches are more standard and uninteresting.
Here's a before and after GIF to show how a sketch gets improved. Some stay the same, which is just my inability at this point in time to improve it, but others manage to get spruced up which is nice.
I think that's all for now, I've got a bunch of stuff to catch up on and I intend to have this month, and this year, to be a really good and productive one. Still unsure about what direction I want my art to go, like how I will make money off it, but that's something to worry about later.
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