energy collapse

I had a nice warm bath yesterday, and afterwards, that was it for me as far as drawing went.

I'd been drawing stuff (mostly) on my laptop using the graphics pad and either Art Weaver or Paint Tool SAI in the lounge room, and the laptop/tablet combo works really well with either of these applications. Butafter the bath I took a shot at inking Trope World -- which I'd pencilled last weekend -- in Illustrator and got a bit lost and a lot frustrated.

I know when to quit, because there's always more I can do the day after. However, I go no webcomic pages done at all yesterday, even though I did get six drawings done. Today should be a housework day. I will cut vacuuming the floors and not mow the lawn, and fit in some art work after the rest is is done. Even if I don't get a lot done today, I will stick at it tomorrow.

Illustration by attrition

I finished housework by about 2pm. Have been fiddling about with Illustrator. The image shown here is part of the result. And just what took all that time for this?

I had to figure out:

• How to save tapered brush strokes for later use (use a style);
• The most efficient colouring for the stroked image (paint with the blob brush underneath and bunch EVERYTHING into layers, sub-layers and groups;
• The best way of setting up traces and panels, which might change.

And all this takes time. I set up a whole series of strokes that I wanted to use for this comic, and saved the lot as a custom set of styles. I draw the strokes in a plain ol' 1pt basic stroke, and set the style to it later.  Lots and lots of work for the moment, but important in the long-run (I hope).

I will finish this a lot quicker later tonight, but the pets (and I) need to be fed, I have a sinus headache, and I think I need to draw some Tales inbetween now and then.