Comic DevBlog #16 (Patreon)

Pages 9, 10 reach final stage.

Instead of simply continuing to work on the comic, taking advantage of the vast amount of time I had, I decided to do something different.

It's been a while since I've had the time to simply stop and think about how to improve my work. It takes a lot of time and doesn't yield any results if the experiments fail. However, even a disastrous result is useful, clearing my memory so I can come up with something new.

So, during my work this month, I tried a bunch of new and old drawing techniques and got quite noticeable results.First, the layer mask. A basic element for many artists, I've stubbornly ignored for years, but its use opens up a wealth of opportunities both for simplifying the work and improving quality. The reasons, by the way, were the problem of saving files in the pirated version of SAI 1, but since I now have a license for SAI 2, I took a fresh look at this function.

Riding the wave of success, I even got the idea to increase the complexity of the shadow layer for the comic. I made a shadow layer for one page, and yes, it looked better. But it was overly complicated and more than that. It was done incorrectly, so I simply had to delete it and start over.

But the experience I gained carried over into this month's special Simple Drawing, which received even more refinement of the shadow layer. Was it useful? Also, no. In the future, it will be simplified too. But it's still an experience.And secondly, water. This month, two different clients commissioned large taur on beach. So I had more opportunities to practice than usual. You can see the results in this month's post. And having learned new ways to draw water, I looked at a comic page I'd almost finished at the beginning of the month and decided it was bad and needed to be changed and re-done. Also, the shadows from the old render version were too saturated.So, based on this month's results i update comic and usual Simple Drawings style, and now i'll need to spend a lot of time working on the eight pages I've already completed, as the new water, shadows, and other tools, in my opinion, look better than before. But not today. I'll simply continue making new pages. It would be incredibly stupid to redo the old pages, make another 10 new ones, and then come up with something new that would require redrawing the previous 20, some of them a second time.And I think you will be more interested in new content than drawing the same thing.I'm also short on orders next month, which means I have a lot of time. Besides a couple of new pages i'll likely focus on "How to make lineless Drawing-class look less bad" and also work on polishing up my Patreon page and reforming my Discord. These damn spam bots must be doomed.