Working in July

Okay, so I made my schedule for the month to work on this book. And I need to learn to take days off. But let's talk about workflow.

The month of July, I'll be working on Oracle. The first three days were just finalizing the script, but the whole rest of the month is all art. What's different is that I'm going to try and do this book digitally. That is, pencils, inks, and colors, everything I prepared myself to do with physical paper will be done in digital using photoshop. This will be my first fully digital comic since I was in elementary school (MS Paint anyone??). The big risk to this is that I'm learning as I go with this, so I could lose time if I get to a point with the pages and I don't like any of them. However, big advantage is that I've honed my skills, figured out some workflow patterns, maintain color strength, and a bunch more. But I am deeply afraid of lost time if this goes south.

This upcoming week's work will be all "pencils" or the basic sketches. Each day, I'm doing about eight pages of sketches, just to establish the backgrounds and basic gestures of each page. Backgrounds are set onto their own layers and folders, separate from foreground elements. This way I can really build up the detail of my backgrounds without them getting lost in my shuffle of foreground action, something I've struggled with for a while in my art. My characters do tend to just float in space rather than have any ground and this could be something I can translate into physical paper drawing if I get really good at it.

Digital drawing also means I can erase as many times as I want without losing the integrity of my paper or wearing out my eraser or smearing ink! So that'll be fun.

Most important to all of this: learning when I can take a day off (or two) per week so I don't burn myself out. I have to make the month, but I also need to spread out my work days. I'm thinking Monday and Thursdays need to be my days off.

All right that's all I got! See y'all on Twitter!!