Back to work on my Jimmy Jay goes to Easter Island book

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On the left, my first sketch; on the right, an anthropomorphic rendition of a tabby cat

Today I redrew the the soaked tabby cat, who happens to be a very mean volcano demon. After two days of rest I’m in an optimistic mood. It shows in my drawings.

Wet Angry Tabby Cat in the making

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A wet cat drawn from imagination

This is my sketch of a wet tabby cat. I’ve never drawn a wet cat before. As usual, my first impulse was to start drawing from memory, but I caught myself and thought, You’re getting off on the wrong foot again! Get some references photos of wet cats. The internet is flooded with them.

So, I looked for some decent reference photos. I found a lot of wet cats. They all looked overpowered and depressed. I was troubled that the captions all reeked of low-level animal cruelty, as in, “Let’s get a good laugh at the miserable animal.” Pathetic stuff in my opinion.

I’m going to go back to drawing from my imagination.

Chore day, November 13, 2021 -- Mushroom Soup and Krita's Colorize Mask

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I’ve been playing with Krita’s autocoloring feature that uses a colorize mask. I’m interesting in using colorizing masks to speed up flatting in Krita. At first I had a hard time getting it to work. The reason for that is that I rarely read documentation. I was lucky to find David Revoy’s video about using Krita’s colorizing mask on Youtube.

In the pictures above you can see that the flatting looks really clean, but sometimes the colors don’t end up where they should be. The idea is that Krita will do most of the work but I have to go in manually at clean up the details. I’m fine with that.

Earlier in the day I made a batch of mushroom soup. It takes four pounds of mushroom and a 12-quart cooking pot to hold everything. The recipe said it would take 45 minutes, but it took me 2 hour and 45 minutes.

The impossibility of painting circles

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Today I tried to draw eyes. Not wonky eyes…good-looking realistic eyes. Couldn’t do it. The right eys was bigger than the left, or the left was slanted up and the right was slanted down. I resolved not to quite until I drew a pair of eyes that didn’t look wonky. But, despite my “I can do this” determination, I ran out of time and have nothing to show today. Normally I would post a picture, no matter how incomplete, no matter how crude, no matter how unappealing, but today, I have nothing that I want to show.

For the last three years I’ve been drawing cartoon animal with round eyes. When I used Procreate, there was the circle tool to automatically draw circles. Photoshop, too, has a circle tool. Clip Studio Paint, circle tools. With Krita, you paint the circles yourself. Painting something that represents and circle is easy enough, but painting an accurate circle is going to take a lot of practice.

For a while I was posting weekly on Instagram, but no longer. It’s a drag to feed Facebook’s mill. It’s a drag to look at everyone’s perfect work. It’s a waste of time to marvel at the perfect circles and straight lines, and perfectly symmetrical eyes when I could be spending that wasted time learning how to draw my own damned circles.

T.G.I.F, again

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It’s 7:15 pm Friday as I write this. Normally I’m off work at 4 pm. The new clients have diminished for 70 to 45 as the withering pace of the programs blows them back into their normal lives. Still, the remaining cohort is hungry, chatty, and demanding more, more, more. Which ultimately means I work late some nights. Hey. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

Now I’m going to start up Krita and doodle for a few minutes.

Page 53 finalized -- 20 pages to go!

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Final version of page 53.

I’m done with this page…for now.

I woke up at 4 am this morning and couldn’t fall back asleep. It’s 7:30 pm and I’m falling asleep at the keyboard. ZZZzzzzzzzz!