The kids ordered big burritos and got the burritos everyone wants — a burrito bigger than your head. I’m trying to capture their amazement. Too bad Betty is hidden behind the stack of burritos. I’ll have to do something special with her ears.
I’ve been working on this image for several days. Jenna Jay is ecstatic; Jimmy is disbelieving; Buddy is indignant; Momma is serene. She’s just told the kids that they have to go North for the summer because that’s what migratory birds and insects do. But Jimmy and Buddy aren’t taking her decision positively.
One of the challenges this picture poses is how to draw expressive hands and faces. When my characters don’t have eyebrows and just have black dots for eyes it’s all the more challenging to use them to express emotion. Hands are always hard.
When I looked at yesterday’s image showing Buddy getting some bad news, I instantly thought “I have to fix those droopy wings!” Buddy is supposed to be upset, not sad. He’s just been told that he has to go back North for the summer — but he wants to go further South to find his family. I removed the first set of droopy wings and gave him some outspread, aggressive wings. While I was drawing the wings I decided to simplify the complex lacework pattern that I’ve been using for his wings — they’re time-consuming to draw over and over.
Clip Studio Note to future self: whenever you create a custom brush, save it as a “material” object. I’ve been creating custom brushes all week. Today I realized that I had modified one of the default brushes and I wanted to restore it to the Clip Studio default. You can get to the interface for resetting defaults by holding down the “shift” key when starting “Paint” inside of Clip Studio. I chose to restore all of the default tools and brush tips. There was a warning, but I didn’t really take it seriously. I assumed that my custom brushes would be untouched. I was wrong — they were deleted when the tools were reset. If I had added my brushes to my “material”, I would have been able to recreate my custom menus with some drag & drop. That’s life! Another day, another lesson, another inch of progress toward finishing this book.
