Studyin' (Patreon)

If you're a $5 patron, apologies for not posting figure drawing this past week! I came home from SPX with a dumb cold and still wasn't feeling well enough to sit up and draw for three hours Wednesday night. 

The only good thing about having a cold is that I get a lot of reading done! I've been re-reading a lot of REALLY good graphic novels lately, and Blankets was the most recent. Show of hands, who's read this masterful book? I hadn't re-read in a few years, and geez, it really holds up. I started marking all the stuff that made me gasp, and, well, marked up half of the book.

I'm a big proponent of copying other artists' work for practice. It can get you out of ruts and make you realize how far you can push a style without it feeling "too far." In this case, it made me also realize how much I love dragging a brush across toothy paper, and how much more lively the lines feel.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the style I want to draw my book in; I want it to feel so organic that the reader can tell it was drawn on paper, not digitally. The colors will almost certainly be digital - for the sake of consistency - but I'm thinking I might use one shade of grey for shadows on the original inks, and alter the color in Photoshop later. I'll see if I can do a test run soon to show you Sneak Peek patrons what I mean.

Part of the reason the style has been on my mind is that I only recently noticed that the first four chapters -  each of which introduces one main character, about 20 pages for each one - are already 80 pages. This is going to be a LONG book! I don't want to sacrifice the slow, easy pacing of the pages I've finished (some pages have 6 panels, some pages have 3, some have just one), so I won't re-write them. I'll just have to accept that when this thing is finished, it's going to be a brick. Not that I haven't had practice. 

I think by keeping the book style loose and easy to ink - by using a brush instead of meticulous smooth pens - it'll go a lot faster and look more lively with less effort. 

But, don't let my logical explanation fool you too much - I'll also have a lot more fun. ;)

By the way, I just changed the description of the $3 tier - it originally said "anything in the $1 and $5 tiers" when it should have just said "anything in the $1 tier." Nothing will change! I just wrote it wrong.

Just to clarify, the difference in the $5 tier is that I post my weekly figure studies for those patrons (plus extra drawings sometimes when I don't wanna bombard the $3 patrons with too many updates). I know not everyone is comfortable seeing those, so I wanted to keep them on a separate tier. 

That's it! End PSA.