Reaching a Production Landmark -- All 42 Rough Sketches are Done

The image above shows my sketches stored in the Clip Studio Cloud.

It took longer than I thought it would, but I’ve finally completed the rough sketches for all 42 pages of my second children’s book, which I’ve given the working title of The Butterfly That Carried A Burro Over A Wall. I’ll probably be changing that title, but for now it captures the spirit of the book.

In the next stage of creating this book I’ll be doing all of the line work. I’ve found the ideal Clip Studio Paint brushes for my clean line inking. There’s a great rough water color brush for the coloring. The inking brush is the turnip brush, which is something like a blunt G-pen. The rough watercolor brush is just that…a rough color wash. I’ll be doing the inking on Clip Studio’s very cool vector layers. They’re a great feature.

Another feature of Clip Studio is that Celsys provides 10GB of cloud storage as part of the Clip Studio Paint package. I like that all of these features and goodies are part of the $50 I paid for Clip Studio 6 years ago. Imagine how much Adobe would be dipping into my bank account every month for the same features. Adobe’s rental model annoys me endlessly. Three cheers for Clip Studio Paint.

Getting Comfortable with Clip Studio Paint

Page 22 rough, showing a snake guiding the kids through the jungle.

I had several extended blocks of time for work because I moved my Thursday weights workout to Friday. My morning time is usually fragmented by some sort of workout — sometimes cardio, sometimes weights. I have no blocks of time more than 45 minutes long to concentrate on my book. But today, by skipping the weights workout, I had three solid hours in the morning and three in the afternoon. It felt good! I’m going to change my workout schedule so that I do cardio and weights on the same day, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I’ll have solid blocks of time for work on Tuesday and Thursday.

I like to post my rough sketches to remind myself that my work goes through an ugly stage and gets better as I pull it all together. It takes all of my will power to not start inking and rendering and coloring.

Writing the Story for My Next Children's Picture Book

Today I gathered together the sketchbooks, pencils, and pens that I’m going to use for my next children’s picture book. It’s a simple kit: an 11x14 sketchbook for practicing drawing my characters and 8.5x11 Bristol board for the inking. I’ll create the storyboard in the big sketchbook — I like to draw big when I’m brainstorming.

I’ll be sketching with pencil and use my light pad for inking on the Bristol board with Rotring Tikky fine liners. For the color, I’ll do that digitally. I’m going to stick with my Frankentoon Crayon color palette.

There a lot of good reasons for just doing everything on the iPad, but I’m convinced that my traditional media drawings look more interesting. They look like a human made them.

The hardest part of creating a book, and the most important part, is writing the story itself. I’ve learned that just sitting down and getting started requires ignoring all of the reasons my mind is giving me to procrastinate, but once I’ve put a few lines on the blank sketchbook, I can feel the momentum shift. I know that I’m moving forward, an inch at a time, and that I will continue to move forward until the book is published. It’s really cool to be on the road again.

I’m aiming for about 40 pages, the same as the last book. Instead of using the square 8x8-inch format I used in my first book, I’m going to go with an A5 size. A5 proportions will work well for both the portrait layout print version and landscape layout ePub version. I learned with my first book that having a single image size saves time. Engraved in my mind is this truth: “Choose one size to fit all formats…and stick with it!” A5 it is.

For today’s sketches I returned to Jack Hamm’s Drawing the Head and Figure and drew some heads. His style is dated and corny, but he’s an amazing comic artist. I know that I can learn a lot from going through his books and copying his work. I’ll have to draw each of these faces dozens of times to become fluent at drawing heads. Learning a new skill requires repetition, which takes time. Fortunately, I’ve learned to be patient when I’m learning new stuff.

I sketched these faces with a flat carpenter’s pencil. I’ll draw them all again tomorrow.