Added 1 new A* page:Of course I wanted to duplicate the relative success of yesterday's page, and I thought I could do that by drawing vigorously (I stopped listening to podcasts--too distracting, maybe?--and just listened to the same Pandora music channel I'd been listening to while up late late late last night churning out yesterday's page: a poppy channel I set up for a friend who came over for a little dinner party one time--on the theory that it's peppy and will keep me stimulated, but might not be something I can take for too many hours at a time, so maybe it'll spur me to working expeditiously. ; ) Also it was part of yesterday's magic formula. : P
Anyway of course it didn't work. The funny thing is that the very first thing I did was what I was number one telling myself specifically to avoid, namely a boring layout with a cartoony character. Don't do this:
So I erased it and went through a lot of frenetic sketching and finally came up with something I thought had some zip
and went right in to color it, which is where things went obviously wrong:
Well I blotted out the face in a last ditch effort / burst of frustration, and to cover up the worst of it. : P I kinda like how the hand and the shoulder above it came out--those have a nice simple solidified shaded look--but on the rest I was trying to do way too much modeling with the watercolors, which doesn't really work; you have to let them do their own thing. It all got blotchy. Also eventually I realized that the exaggerations of the proportions--the enlarged shoulder and zipper and so forth--that I thought were adding zip were really just more cartooning, and going away from the direction I want to go in; exaggerating stuff is an easy way to add pizazz, but I shouldn't be using it as a crutch. Gotta find a way to make each panel memorable without resorting to that type of distortion--it should be possible, darn it, even when the image doesn't call for action or whatever. Heck tomorrow's is a still shot without even any dialogue, we'll see how many tries it takes me to get that one! : oo
I put together a little checklist of things to remind myself to watch out for based on today's initial attempts, and then on the final one, in which I kind of wanted to rediscover what worked about yesterday's page with a different subject, and found, by missing them, some things that had worked well yesterday that I hadn't been sufficiently aware of:
- don't cartoon
- keep it simple
- don't do too much modeling
~~~~~~~~
- don't draw shadow borders in pencil--work them out with the big brush in watercolor
- use magenta for flesh underpainting, not purple--purple is the shadow that goes on top later
So we'll see how much of this I manage to forget tomorrow. :PP
|
