[101114]

This is my 300th NW post. Over the course of six years, I have thus actually averaged about one post a week, if not slightly less. J has about 290, but he’s pretty close to 300 as well.

Today’s post is a couple of sketches. The last time I did such a dump (dump as in I drew a lot, not posted a lot; I can only find one posted sketch from the last dump – admittedly this wasn’t a very big dump in the first place) was July of 2009. Between now and then, not much has actually changed, if anything.

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[100513]

I have an essay due in 15 hours, but at the moment, I’d rather write this entry.

Today’s update… I’ve been talking about it since December, but it’s finally, finally done and not a month too soon with Fanime coming up in a couple weeks. DMG 2009 done in 2010; probably better described as “2009-2010″ as it’s kind of a hybrid or something of the sort.

This really is a piece that’s been on the cutting board forever. The lineart was actually put down in the same batch as the doodles posted in d241, and the intent to paint it probably spawned at about the same time. But at the end of 2009, I decided to paint my Tales 2009 series first. The folder for this illustration is C091229, the date on which I decided I really did want a DMG 2009 and scanned the sketch, possibly with the intent of finishing the piece before the year’s end.

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[091229]

So J decided that we should do a little NW activity, and I obliged. He said we should each select a “best panel of 2009″, and I did. So now I’m going to comment a little on my choice.

The panel in question is the last panel of “Manly Thirst” in j???. Runner up is the last panel of “20 More Questions” in j???.

For the most part, while I don’t really abide by this rule, I think content is the more important thing for a webcomic (over art). The only webcomic I read these days is XKCD, because, well, it’s clever.

So for me, since I don’t really do anything notable content wise, the choice would default to “which panel has the best art”, which is indeed how I’d select a best panel for myself. And I think I’ve written about this before; the best panel is probably something in 520 range or whatever.

For J on the other hand; he’s actually got some clever ones, so I find myself skipping over most of the story strips and debating between the clever ones, and there aren’t too many of ‘em. Most of them like “RLRAOS: New Jersey” in j??? are funny wholistically, but you can’t really say that there’s one panel that really works well on it’s own. Same goes for something like “Playback” in j???.

So it comes down to the two aforementioned choices simply because I think they do well standing alone. The last panel in “20 More Questions”, I’d giggle if that was a standalone comic just because of the word “poop”. Yeah, yeah, we’re all a little immature. That one does better alone text wise, but the kicking ass thing has the funny dude and J w/h uniform, and that ultimately swayed me over to “Manly Thirst”.

Ok, enough of that, here’s today’s update; the last painting in this batch.

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[091222]

This week’s update is the painting that I mentioned last week, and the first of two – maybe three – for this “cycle”.

It’s actually been a whopping eight months since I last did a painting, so I figured I damn better do one or something. Ever since I started doing paintings, I’ve never had such a long hiatus between two of ‘em. Especially through 2006 and 2007, I was pretty much turning something out every other month, but things started to taper off in 2008, and a helluvalot in 2009. Even if I do three paintings in the current cycle, that’ll make a grand total of five paintings for 2009, compared to 8 for 2008, and 11 for 2007.

Anyway, I was messing with a couple of things this time around, and I thought I was going to end up with something significantly different from any previous work, but… it wasn’t. Well, ok, it’s more like I still feel that this picture gives off a different “feel” than any previous picture, but I don’t really feel like anything drastic happened at a lower level.

So here it is, Raine and Tear 2009 versions. This is more like the “benchmark” illustration for the year, as I don’t have a DMG 2009 version, nor do I plan to do one as one of the three.

The last Raine illustration was February of 08 and the last Tear illustration was November of 07. You can kind of see what I mean when I say that the painting style really hasn’t changed much. I’ve been doing the same patchy kind of thing since 071120, and I think I’ve mentioned that it gets pretty bad in 080126 before I struck a balance somewhere.

Lineart quality (and I emphasize this word to make a point later) is actually most similar to 081015 in that I only use a 1pt pen to do everything and go over lines a lot, rather than the fairly neat 2pt deal used in Raine 2008. At the working resolution of about 3400 by 2500 (iirc), this is actually fairly messy, but at the standard posting resolution of 760 x 1112 you really just see a single line. More on that later.

So if quality of the painting and the quality of the lineart – in the sense of “properties”, rather than “good or bad” – are more or less stuff we’ve seen before, I’d love to say that it’s lineart content (as in the actual drawing itself) or coloring content (not sure what this would refer to… the colors themselves maybe?) that has improved, but that might be a little optimstic. I did spend a lot of time tweaking this lineart after the initial scan, so I won’t totally discount it though. I still strongly believe that I solid lineart hella makes up for shitty paintjob.

With fanarts like this (the majority of my painting these days – hey, it’s fanart that sells at like Fanime), most of the colors are actually taken straight from the reference drawings. If the reference drawings don’t give me enough range between the light and the dark, I will tweak the colors a bit, but I think they’re fairly faithful for the most part.

I did add extra red to the picture though (at the painting stage – I always increase red a little bit during the color adjustment stage), and I think it really helps add some – in J’s words – “visual interest”. The lighting kinda got ambiguous towards the end cuz I wasn’t paying too much attention, but these days I really think that I good paintjob has less to do with how it’s done than with the colors themselves and how they interact with each other. The previous three “best piece”s 090129, 080702, and 080126 all have a set of secondary (and more in the case of 090129) colors mixed into the base colors, and they were all “best” paintings despite fairly different painting and lineart styles. So color I feel is a big deal.

So where is this going – I guess the suggestion here – and I actually didn’t think so far ahead at the beginning of this entry, so this is new material for me too – is that color and lineart content, that is, the colors and the drawing themselves, are more important than how they’re put onto the paper or whatever medium you’re working with. It doesn’t matter if you have a nice, clean lineart if the drawing itself isn’t that good. I guess the same goes for color, but it’s kind of hard for me to give examples as I can’t quite draw the lines between good color, bad color, good coloring, and bad coloring.

And this is where I’m going to segue into one of the main pillars of my current theory of “good drawing”, but I think I will save that for next week as this week’s entry is getting long. The point that I wanted to make was that this’ll surpass Mikoto as “best picture”, but I’m not 100% sure what I think I’m doing right.

Ok, that’s it for now.

[090811]

I’m reading a book called Outliers, which basically suggests that you need to have put in 10000 hours of “real” effort into something before you’re good at it. So it got me thinking how many hours I’d put into drawing since I started to take it more seriously.

So I’m going to start counting from around 2003, which is when I really started to try and actively improve on my art. This effort really has paid off; I may have made this reference a few times now, but the difference between comic 1 and comic 192 is much less than the difference between comic 193 and comic 487. Both 1 and 192 and 193 and 487 were drawn five years apart. But of course, the greatest difference here is probably between 192 and 193 themselves.

At any rate, I’m starting the count from 193, which, though you can’t see it, is dated for April of 2003. Between then and now, I’ve done approximately 541 + 20 – 193 = 368 comic pages, and I’d say each of these pages took about 3 hours on average to draw. This figure is the rate upon which I was converging in the 500s, and although many early pages may have taken much longer, there’s also a significant number of 4koma, etc in there. So that’s about 1104 hours just from comics.

About the same time (2003), I started doing sketches in sketchbooks. Since then, I’ve put in about 500 pages worth of sketches at about 2 hrs per page. Some of the pages are just total crap, some have some fairly nice shit, but most are probably approximately 2 hour pages of sketches. So another 1000 hours. for a total of 2100. I have some loose leaf paper sketches too, though these are exceeding rare these days; I’d give it another 100 pages at an hour a page for a total of 2200.

Now comes the really hard one to estimate. I’ve turned out about 65 “finished” drawings since 2004. These are the ones in color, and I think the time taken on each varies wildly. I’m sure there are some that must have taken upwards of 20 hours, but then there are also those which took maybe 5. I would think that the majority is closer to 20, so I’m going to slap a 15 hour per colored piece figure into this mess, though that’s probably an overestimation. This gives me another 1000 hours, putting the grand total at 3200.

Add another 200 or 300 hours for paintchats and random shit like that, and we’re at about 3500, which seems to be about right?

So there you go. Another 6500 hours before I’m good at this. At the rate I’m going, I’ll be 30 by that time. That’s not actually that bad, and I’m sure the less worthwhile hours I put in prior to 2003 must be worth something if not quite as much.

Til next time.