Changing Horses Midsteam, Against My Own Advice

A few posts ago I pondered the foolishness of changing software in the middle of a project. Climbing the learning curve of a professional quality graphic editor is really spinning your wheels when you have a deadline. But I did it anyway.

I’m now using Affinty Photo for iPad to color my images. After some initial confusion and frustration, I was able to learn enough in one day to color several images. The irony is that I opened them in Photoshop to clean them up for this blog post.

So far I’m intrigued by Affinity Photo, but I have to say, it has an amazingly incomprehensible color picker. Something that should be drop-dead simple turns out to be mind-boggling. There are actually three color pickers, and they all seem to do something different! After an hour of fumbling and googling I found a way to pick colors, but it wasn’t with the color picker tool in the left sidebar, nor was it with the color picker in the color panel — I have no clue what those two color pickers do. The color picker in the brush color panel does work the way Photoshop’s color picker works…I think.

Today is the first day of my one-week vacation, which explains why there are two pictures in this post. Affinity Photo has a lot more brushes than I wanted to deal with today, so I created a simple round brush with 50% opacity, 5% flow, with size modulated by pressure — basically a marker brush. It worked great and was not at mysterious, puzzling, or baffling.

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Another lost file, or am I losing my mind?

I’ve got to get organized…for the next book. My problem is that I feel that I’m losing pictures that I’ve already colored, but now I’m getting the feeling that I only think that I’ve painted them. All of the images I’ve painted are on this blog, and when I look for the “missing” pictures, they’re not here, which definitely means I never painted them in the first place. Mystery solved.

For the next book I’m going to get organized. When I started this book I had a casual system, but somewhere along the line I got sloppy. Too frequently my “systems” become an inconvenient pain to deal with and I just start winging it. I end up stashing files on iCloud, or on OneDrive, or in Dropbox, or in whatever directory I happen to be working in.

Here’s the directory system I’ll use for my next book. I got this idea from my partner, who is very, very organized. It’s simple enough that I will be able to work with it.

Today’s image shows the Jay family about to get on the Moustache Bus. This is one of my favorite scenes.

Repainting a Clobbered Drawing

One thing that’s different today is that there’s not a first line of “XX/365”. I’m going to ditch the “365 day project” stuff.

Now that I see myself as an illustrator and author of children’s books, I don’t see much point is carving a notch on the Internet every time I do my job. Counting the days I go to work is a pointless gimmick. But, these look-how-many-days-I’ve-done-something projects have their use; they prod you to stop binge-watching Letterkenny and start doing your chores. That’s good enough, I say. And now, there’s choring to do. Pitter patter!

Today I discovered that I had overwritten the PSD file containing the image of Jimmy and Buddy reading comic books on the bus ride to Ashland. It happened like this: I was doing all of my editing in the .tiff file that came out of the scanner. When I exported the PNG for the blog post, I closed the .tiff file and got the pop-up: “Save changes?” I like to save the original scan for just-in-case, so I said No. That’s when I lost my work — I had never saved the image as a PSD file. Doh!

Fortunately I had the scan to work with. The PNG file supplied the color palette I had used the first time I worked on this drawing.

A Before and After with Buddy Butterfly

95/365

I believe I improved my drawing of Buddy flying to the chimney. The first version looked like he was lying flat on the roof instead of flying above it.

Somedays Everthing Slows Down to a Crawl

94/365

Not much progress today. At least, not as much as I wanted. The switch from Sketchbook to Photoshop is giving me bad dreams. I feel like I’m trying to run through hardening cement. The feeling of frustration and impatience penetrates my dreams. I’m dreaming of color palettes these days. Whenever I’m learning something intense and under pressure, my dreams become vivid.

The high point of my day was supporting Shoo Rayner on Patreon. He’s a great children’s book illustrator and author, and he shares everything about his process. I chose the $15 level so that I can watch his process videos, including preparing his books for IngramSpark and his Affinity Photo videos.

I completed this painting today, but it doesn’t feel complete. However, seeing this picture as it will appear on the printed page, I like it more than I thought I would. This is the first time I’ve backed off and viewed it a print size, and it looks good to me. Perhaps I spent too much time poring over every pixel at 400% magnification. When I do that the warts look like mountains.

ETA: I backed off my $15 patronage to $1. Unfortunately, Shoo hasn’t put the IngramSpark videos on Patreon yet. He’s a cool guy and I know he’ll come through. When he does, I’ll go back to the $15 level because I really want to see how he prepares his books for IngramSpark!

Our Heroes Emerge from Desperate Straits

92/365

I colored today’s drawing in Photoshop rather than Sketchbook. It went okay, but I had to do without a few of Sketchbook’s really handy features. In Sketchbook you can switch to the previous brush by hitting “S”. But in Photoshop there’s no way to switch to the previous tool—you have to back to the brush palette. The other Sketchbook feature I missed, my favorite in fact, was the built-in Copic color palette that shows the complements of every selected color. There’s nothing like that in Photoshop, as far as I know. My workaround was to do a screen print of the Sketchbook Copic palette, open it in Photoshop, and select colors from that. Poor me—I have so many grass-is-greener problems! Wherever you go, you’re gonna have problems.

My Conscious Attempt to Lead the Viewer's Eye Through a Painting

90/365

In this picture I intentionally combined four separate paintings into one painting, with one scene leading into another and ending at the bottom left corner. The four scenes show the boys riding bikes, playing football, playing cards, and listening to tunes in the pool.

Finished King of the World Painting

89/365

I worked on this picture for two days. My big issues were: unwittingly painting colors on the line work layer, deleting a layer of colors and not being able to recover it, not naming the layers. And more. I’m learning a lot about the necessity of well-organized layers. Folders for layers would be a big help, but I don’t see that feature in Sketchbook.

The wings, the wings! And Buddy has four fingers in this picture. In other pictures he has five!

Buddy Butterfly feeling like the King of the World

88/365

I did something wacky today. After spending days setting up custom Sketchbook brush libraries, I got the crazy idea to reset everything to their default settings. I was warned with a big pop-up window that everything would go back the Sketchbook’s original settings. But I didn’t listen. I pushed the reset button. Everything went back to normal and all of my installed brushes and custom libraries disappeared. I wasted an hour reinstalling the brushes I had been using.

And so, here’s today’s half-finished painting. Why do I decide to go on these whimsical, time-wasting expeditions of foolishness when I’m on a tight deadline? The answer is uncountable thousands of times.

A Butterfly Takes the Blame

85/365

Today’s image is a work in progress. I tried to put a little detail into Buddy Butterfly, with some veins in his wings and a little shading. Details eat up my time, especially when I don’t know what I’m doing when I’m learning how to operate a new program.

Enough chit chat. The dogs are waiting for me. They say I’ve got to take a shower and get ready for Second Family Hour.

I ran out of time… I’ll finish this tomorrow.