Suuper's manga (+digital and 3D)

[Coryn]

Good luck Suuper! I'd love to see a fully rendered 1 page manga from you this year as a goal. Since we've been talking achievable goals recently, I think that could serve as a great challenge for anyone.

[Suuper-san]

thanks for the goal Coryn, that's definitely on my agenda. I'd like to get an ultimate quality one-shot done this year. The only reason I didn't get it done last year was I started doing manga commissions and that took a fair bit of my spare time for longer projects. Amongst other difficulties, adding tones to manga is the most difficult step for me at the moment, I simply don't know what to do with my lineart to render it ahahaha
I've been doing some studies in that regard seeing how other artists do it but until I tackle it myself I probably wont make much headway.

[Coryn]

True that. A lot of time the only way forward is to jump in to the deep end, and damn the consequences. If you aren't 100% happy, then you're still on the journey and that's fine. No professional artist ends their journey at the same quality they debut at do they?

[Suuper-san]

True true, there's quite a big gap between entry level professional and "pro" professional XD

anyways have some sketches, these are from a super old project that I just dug up and figured I'd get back into circulation. Basically it's a redraw project (meant to be coloured but this rotation didn't get it), with the target quality of "coloured sketch". So it's not meant to be as neat as a lineart, but equally it's still meant to look good. I've got 2 coloured sketch projects that I think I'll combine into just one, as the overlap is quite large.

 

Otherwise I've been busy with other life stuff, but getting more momentum lately, sort of. Never seems to be quite as crisp these days as it used to be. Everything seems more vague and harder to evaluate. I thin maybe I've piled up a few too many projects that I haven't finished, and that's just telling on me.

But I hope I'll be posting more frequently on MR as I said, and hopefully that'll give me some stability and a reference point to evaluate against, every time I post.

Edit:
I think I'm going to go back to my time spent drawing graph...while it's not the perfect measure of productivity, it's certainly quite close for an average "are you doing good or not?" check.
And I think in my case, time spent drawing = productivity since I'm super well organized when I actually do my stuff.
Twice as much time spent will certainly mean more stuff done even if it isn't double, is what I mean.

Spoiler

So far the last entire year I didn't really hit anything decent, so I'm aiming for 3-4 hours a day average minimum, with an ideal 6-7 if I stop mucking about and seriously focus. So stay tuned.
And if I do actually manage to hit that target, then we'll see some serious stuff happen this year. Again we'll see :P
Gotta use my mornings more effectively and stop oversleeping for a start...

[Suuper-san]

Got a lot going on but productivity is starting to increase despite that, I hope it's a sign that my schedule and motivation etc are improving. Only 4 days in but I definitely get the feeling the daily sketch is helping, glad I started that up again. The issue last time with the daily sketch was that I reached a point where I was confident in my style and quality and so figured I would be best to focus on other skills and projects. And then that lead to having days where I didn't do much, which led to weeks where I didn't do much. The advantage of having a daily project is that it's a backup course-corrector if things are starting to go downhill a bit. Of course if you're not great at motivation in the first place you might struggle to do a daily sketch anyway, but at least for me it works I think. We'll see if long term it helps at all.

Anyways I finally got the chance to continue my traditional project which I started during my family holiday. To the right is my latest sketch, with the left, one I did 6 months ago. Seems like an improvement although can't say with just the one sketch I might have been lucky. But I'm hopeful all the same.



I also managed a nice sketch in my sketchbook while I was in my lunchbreak at work. Managed to get a nice quality from that given I was not in the best place to focus really XD
Got to show it off to my colleagues and students so that was nice :P



Also got my productivity graph which I'm trying to keep in mind more regularly to notice any deadspots in my schedule. All in all a disappointing start to the year but 2 hours average a day isn't to be sniffed at. I get the feeling things are on the up so we'll see what Feb looks like.

Spoiler

So, not much has happened but I've been fairly busy. Hoping to channel that business into my art for the next month and onwards. Got my cosplay to start worrying about very soon as well but I'm hoping I can bish-bash-bosh that out nice and quickly this time.

onwards and upwards!!

[Operative13]

You can definitely see the 6 months improvement: the face is actually in the right place! (Eh?  )

It reminds me of those portfolios where the mangaka draws the same character with different expressions. It not only teaches you consistency in character design, but also teaches you how muscles widen and contract around the face as they express themselves.

[Suuper-san]

@operative thanks! partly the reason I am unsure how much I have improved is that with a single drawing, there are a lot of factors affecting the final quality such as complexity, composition, difficulty, focus, mood, memory, energy etc. So while my latest drawing is better than the one I did previously, I'm not sure that my overall skill has improved. i.e. it could have just been luck. The previous sketch was a more complex head angle as well which made it harder to draw, whereas my latest one is just a facing forward shot.

I absolutely love those character sheet chart things, I've used quite a few as art reference for drawing different angles and expressions. Definitely have to make some of my own when I'm designing characters.

[Coryn]

While we all have days or peroids when we're off, I'm a firm believer that as long as we continue working, we aren't backsliding, and are actively improving. Sometimes though you improve in a disconnected fashion. Some aspect of your art will improve, while your eye for it may not.

[Suuper-san]

oh definitely, it's always that wobbly line going upwards, but with lots of different skills at different rates which makes it a pain to measure progress XD
but indeed, slow and steady wins the race

[Suuper-san]

been a small while since an update. hopefully keeping to a regular-ish post schedule will help to keep track of my productivity better.
I'm doing better mentally but not much to show for it physically, artwise.
I've been mostly distracted reading manga I think.

All the same have a quick sketch. This is from my no-guidelines sketch page. or rather, "supremely faint guidelines", where I practice as if I'm using a ballpoint pen so I have to draft faintly on the same layer. I rather enjoy this as it's pretty quick to knock out a sketch but has traditional art applications unlike a lot of other digital work.


No progress on my new story yet as I've put that on a small hold, but I've made a little headway in just accepting that the project won't produce very good work and so I've got to be prepared for a fair amount of disappointment in quality not being proportional to effort. Or rather the large amount of required effort is spread rather thinly over a large amount of content.

Sleep has been the biggest issue for me with productivity. A lot of my art time is in the mornings, and so when I oversleep, I lose 4+ hours of art, and that's basically every day for a couple of months at least now that I've not been consistent. Not sure why but as always I blame stress from work. But ultimately I think I have to learn to coexist with my other stresses otherwise my life is going to be dominated by work stress and I'll never be productive. I can't realistically expect my life to be stress-free, and so I'm better off building up a bit of resilience I think. Partly why that's difficult is I'm quite conscientious so I'll think about work in my free time. It's hard to block it off completely when I'm off duty. But I'll try harder now that I'm seeing the damage its doing to my schedule.

so hopefully, as always, we'll see some improvements.
I'd definitely like to see my productivity go back to how it was a couple of years ago when I was dishing out WIPs or doing my manga serials.

[Coryn]

Work stress is definitely a hard hitting force impacting our creative schedules. But you're on the money saying we have to learn to manage the stress we can't avoid. As long as you aren't being self destructive though that's the most important thing (and I do count clamming up and doing absolutely nothing as self destroying)

[Suuper-san]

yeah I think knowing is half the battle when it comes to problems, just being aware of what is the issue can help you focus to reduce the problems it causes.

for once in a while I've actually managed to do some of my WIPs, not really a great quality but it's nice to see some sketches come along. This particular level of sketch has been almost a year since I last did it so it's well overdue.

   

Also did some figures which I also havent done in ages. Good practice and I save them all in a massive folder which I might use for inspiration or something. I'll also be doing higher quality figures at some point using these as a base.
I use various phrases as inspiration to try and produce a high range of poses as well as difficult ones that might not be useful in a piece but helps to make sure I understand how the body works.



so definitely some progress compared to previously but nowhere near my target.

[Suuper-san]

Finally finished a batch of resolved WIPs at my new quality.
the concepts themselves are varied quality as always but the execution has gotten maybe 10% better with my new workflow. I basically put a lot of effort into the figure because the details are balanced onto the figure and so a good base figure guideline will mean that all the details like face and clothes are in the right place. Most of these sketches I'm pretty confident I could ink at a super high level and they'd not have much wrong with them. (although my inking stage has a quality control check anyway to fix stuff)
This style is basically a levelled up version of the rougher quicker style in the previous post, which uses less layers for everything to give a generally accurate but low quality sketch. this workflow uses more than double the layers so everything gets a lot of iterations to adjust and improve accuracy.
The speed is also improved from the old workflow for this level and I even have a couple of ideas to boost the speed a tiny bit more by limiting the number of layers I use for adding details - I use 2 at the moment but 1 seems to work so well that I might use just 1 for most of the work.
These are the best ones from the batch. Overall pretty happy and I'm thinking this will definitely make a good manga page style , really have to try it to know for sure. Backgrounds take a lot of time even with this method but I'm slowly getting used to getting the guidelines for BG in place and on the right layers so I don't waste too much time.

 
 
 

[Suuper-san]

felt like posting a quick one today.
just a 10 minute sketch on a single layer, one of my many long term projects to gain different skills. It's gotten a lot easier to plan and ink these without too much problems, although the concept is still quite in the comfort zone as I can't afford to make mistakes, I'm emulating real ink so I don't use undo in this project. Actually I hardly use undo at all I've gotten so used to being careful lol



I'm also developing a new "skill" that I noticed starting to emerge years ago, of very high accuracy inking at low zoom (i.e. without zooming in). I'm not sure of its potential but at least for traditional it might give some speed boosts, as well as low-mid level sketches in digital.

in other news I've almost narrowed down the genre and plot of one of my 4 stories. More to follow once I actually get the time to plan them properly.