Valentine's Day Pinup
Transcript:
Alice: Ok, show off those long legs Jess.
Jess: Eh?!
Hope: hee hee, Jess, you're blushing!
Jess: I am not blushing.
Yay, my first (*cough*copout*cough*) pinup!
Yeah, I need to get caught up around here :P I had fun making the pinup, but it's not the greatest and has nothing to do with the story...
I blame hubby for reintroducing me to Questionable Content. I tried to only read it while the renders were running, but I kept forgetting to check on them... It is an awesome webcomic, and reading it makes me wish I was funny. And able to draw quickly.
People seem to assume that anyone who uses Daz or Poser or a similar program to create images does so because they can't draw. I can draw. I even managed to (somehow) get into art school on the strength of my drawings, but there are (at least) two things that keep me from drawing this comic rather than rendering it.
One is that I'm not a very good cartoonist. I'm a bit like a human camera when it come sto drawing. I record exactly what's there. Every wrinkle, every spot, every weird little shadow... I nitpick and erase and redraw and tend to end up with something accurate but rather mechanical unless forced to draw quicker than I want to. Every once in a while I manage to take a realistic drawing and turn it into something manga-esque, but that in itself is a painfully slow process, which brings me to my second reason for rendering...
I draw slowly. Veeerrry slowly. The nitpicky nature that actually works in my best interest when it comes to renders makes me either erase and redraw till the paper wears out or throw out the entire thing and start over in frustration. It takes me a long time to get something I like.
Even when it comes to renders, I'm tempted to screw around and fiddle and fix everything over and over. I made a promise to myself when I started the comic (this time! I've started 3 times already, once with drawings and once with renders) that I would not go back and re-do pages I'd already published. So the glaring errors stay, no matter how much they bug me. Last week's comic was a bit rushed, and Jess's finger is going through her leg in the third panel, which I didn't notice until after putting it up. I will not fix it. I. Will. Not. Fix. It. It's a slippery slope people, if I start fixing stuff I will never get on with the story o.O
Hopefully though things will improve. I'm realizing now that I need to work on lighting some more, having lights that are stuck to the "setting" just doesn't cut it. And why do I make things so damn brightly colored?
Hubby deserves another mention here, in that he also pointed out that I spend a lot of time bitching about the art and not much talking about the story or other things. (Ok, he put it much more democratically than that :P) I will try and think of other things to say! ...Or maybe just shut up. Maybe I will have to make another promise regarding art bitching... like the "not starting over" promise. Except I don't think I could stand to not bitch. Maybe I'll have to limit it to one or two sentences...
