Chore & Al Fresco Art Club Day, Mar 27 -- Chopping Down Trees and Redoing Old Paintings

I couldn’t complete this assignment in one hour…I’ll continue next week.

Today was Chore Day and Alfresco Art Club Day. For chores, I did the laundry and vacuuming, and I pruned our giant shrub growing out of control into the neighbor’s yard. What a pain in the ass, literally. The bush is on a slope and the footing was loose decorative rocks. As I was pruning a tough limb, I lost my footing and fell on my ass. Fortunately, no damage was done.

For art club, the task was to simplify an old painting. The idea was to find a way to convey the same meaning as the original, but with a simpler, more efficient technique. In other words, remove all unnecessary details such as excessive rendering and goodies that do not convey meaning.

(edited Mar 28)

Working on the Storyboard

I’m seeking an efficient work flow. I have a ton of pages to create and I don’t want to get bogged down, as I did with the first book Yet, as much as I yearn for speed, finding the way to produce a lot of successful pages has been as elusive as tracking down the Holy Grail. Just as I think I’ve found The Way, I realize that I’m dealing with a mirage that vanishes when I try to grasp it. I’ve tried the iPad, traditional media (which I love), and Photoshop. But I haven’t clicked with them.

Yesterday I put away my Wacom tablet and took my Huion 22 inch pen display out of mothballs. Working with the tablet is good, but I’m slow. I wanted to see if I can work more efficiently with a pen display. The answer is Yes. Today I worked with the pen display and Clip Studio Paint and was able to work smoothly for hours generating pages with the proper bleed lines (a critical time saving feature). I’m using the Pro version of CPS (Clip Studio Paint). Creating one image at a time creates a directory full of files. I’m considering the CPS Ex version — it generate and organize all of the pages the entire book and export all of the images as a PDF, much like InDesign. Clip Studio Paint has awesome features for generating comics and surpasses Photoshop and Procreate in that respect. Looks good.

Bettina is a new character. She’s friendly, loyal, strong, and cheerful, and she’s on her way to Mexico, too.