Anyways monthly report. kinda fed up of doing sorting out monthly these days, it seems to only be for statistics and I don't even think I care about those statistics anyway. we'll see. I have adjusted my recording to allow for less physical work and my programs work behinds the scenes, but really I should be focusing forwards. There's very few statistics that need to be updated monthly, and they can be done at any time. Might be worth coding up something to deal with it for me.
Especially as I am doing different pages at all sorts of different levels, I want to be able to work out average times for each sketch style or stage. Thats was OK when it was only 4 stages but I'm close to 10-20 different styles or stages and it's just a pain now. And I forget what statistics I'm even meant to be generating haha
Anyways here's a graph. Not my best month this year but better than any in the previous year bar last Feb. So even though I'm not meeting my targets I'm performing well above my previous averages.
70 hours drawn this month. Not including Aggie or traditional.
Working daily has been the biggest contributor to my latest boost to productivity. It's helped to get over bumps of not wanting to do stuff, and I've just plain got on with it because it's my daily routine. There's been plenty of days when the routine hasn't gone as I've wanted, but it's becoming more and more stable. Even when I haven't done what I planned, I've done
something. So averaging over 2 hours a day isn't to be sniffed at.
My lineart goal is 137/200. I'm not sure if I want to get to 200, but the quality is coming out nicely. Actually I've been feeling really bad about almost all of the linearts I've produced and looking back as I sort through them, they are all pretty nice quality. So either I'm tired atm and I can't see the faults, or I'm just pessimistic when I'm drawing.
My body shade study goal is at 60/1000. I'm doing 8 studies a day instead of 6 now (adjusted my grid haha)
So far it's hard to get a workflow that's consistent, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, depending on the specific way I need to shade the area. So I'm not as fast as I would like. It's taking about 4-5 minutes per study. I'm copying them quite well but I don't seem to remember any of it yet. When I zoom out the studies almost look realistic which I'm quite proud of.
The Inked hands regime is at 200/500. For some reason it's gone slower than I expected, so I must have missed quite a lot of days when I first started it up. At the moment I'm doing 10 a day consistently.
Requests are going slow because I'm way too serious about them, but at least when I finally do them I hope the quality is that much higher because of the effort. Next time I need to crank the quality wayyyy down haha.
The highlight of this month was probably my masterpiece coloured pieces. It's the best work I've done in ages, and it's finished work - not a WIP anymore!!!! makes a change.
And I can see where I need to improve so it'll get even better I hope.
Actually dealing with generating statistics for the masterpiece levels was what pushed me near the edge for giving up on statistics. Because it doubled my workload instantly. But I might have a way around that which I just thought of. And it doesn't even need to be done monthly - it can be done whenever. Oh and that's just triggered another idea that's even better. OK I can do this!!!
Picking a random canvas to work a little on is great when I'm tired. The main hurdle to getting projects done is that I never feel up to the task. If I'm having a bad day, I think I'm going to ruin everything, and if I'm having a good day, I want to spend my energies on some new project or idea. So either way it's a bit of an annoyance. But the random picker seems to help when I'm getting tired and can't choose. having too many projects might be the cause of my indecision to begin with, but at least I've got a way around it.
I'm working on a new drawing position with my screens that gives me access to my keyboard. I have to swivel my body so I'm not sure if it's great for my posture, but for typing sentences for manga I think it's wayyy faster and neater than handwriting - I can actually read it for starters, even with insane typos. we'll see.
anyways I don't really feel like posting any art, I do my daily sketch every day anyway. if I finish my inking project you'll see all of them so stay tuned.
the daily sketch has been a rollercoaster of ideas. I don't want to do them coloured anymore because if they are going into WIPs then I have to recolour them again at some point so it's a waste of time.
as always I've got tons of projects I want to do but skill-crunching is taking about 75% of my time so I can't progress much, but long term it's for the best.
I'm gonna try and get a bit more art in before the day ends.
oh here's how my averages compare for normal WIPs vs masterpiece WIPs
Mostly a masterpiece takes 3 times as long as a standard WIP of the same level.
The concepts are the same time because I didn't have my method together until the end.
I'm not liking this trend of time=quality
and good news I tried out the new statistics processing method I just thought of and so far it works a treat. So I can leave more statistics generation to automated stuff. In fact it worked so well I almost want to kick myself for not doing it sooner. The one trouble with being able to do tedious and long work is sometimes you don't realise that it can be made easier, because you dont view work as a negative factor. They were right when they said if you want an easier way to do something, give it to a lazy person to do. They'll pick the route of least resistance. I just go straight through mountains lol.