Comic Scenes part 5 and Stories

20 Feb 2014

It's been awhile since I last typed here. At some point many days ago, I wanted to find time to write here as I was getting quite excited about the things I was working on, but decided to hold it off.

Today I finally have some spare time to write here, and tomorrow is a Friday!

First of all, I have stopped working on the main storyline comic scenes. I have not wrapped them up yet since I am just taking a break from the nearly 50 scenes I drew. This does not mean I have stopped drawing entirely. Rather, I am pretty hyped up drawing new and better scenes that can potentially be used! I have also begun to work on small branches of comics and stories that seem to have really great potential and based on the comments I received, these little comics are "good"!

I am also experimenting on different methods of drawing and optimizing the time I take to draw comics to increase my efficiency.

I spend about 75% of my time tracing my handdrawn backgrounds and characters and getting the turtles to "look right". That's the tough part. Using a pen tool to trace over my handdrawn turtles just doesn't seem very natural.

The turtles also lose some of the stuff that makes it look good and they don't look that alive as commented from Li Hao when I put a handdrawn scene beside a digital scene. It looks like converting a scene to digital made the turtles look less alive.

This made me rethink about the way I draw my comics digitally. Li Hao talked about WACOM, a drawing tablet that can potentially solve my problems. It's an expensive investment though. But it will make my life smoother.

The hard part about a comic is getting a good story, whereas the tracing is the tedious part. Thankfully, I can work on the hard part outside of home, which means when I get home, all I need to do is start on the drawing. But tracing takes up so much time.

I decided to test my hand drawing skills, by drawing with the mouse, rather than tracing with the pen. I think I sort of trained my mouse-control from using Paint for several years. When I first did this on a new comic, the outlines of turtles didn't look as clean, but I could see that the turtles look more natural and alive, and their expressions are really more life-like. The best part was, I completed the same amount of work that would take an entire day, in 3 hours! Massive time saver there!

I actually began to like the handdrawn turtles. But I hope to get more opinions.

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So I began to work on this new comic codenamed comic Jig (seen above), and another comic, CliffTop (seen below), that was completely handdrawn on my phone.

I would upload them onto my computer and the only thing I would need to do is to add colours once I reach home. This eliminated the drawing I needed to do at home and saved me a lot of time. I was quite happy!

Sadly, at this point, I am beginning to realise that perhaps game development isn't something I might pursue, since I am doing better at other areas, from what I have been told. While this project has come a long way and I am more proud of it than anything else I have ever done, I feel it lacks a lot of the feeling that I express through drawing.

But I still have lots to do, and I wonder what the future has in stall for me.