Sausage Factory

More Prodigy is incoming, and I hope to finish the fifth page by Friday. The results are good, but progress is slow, even with the hours I put in and never taking a day off. I will take at least one day off in Seattle this year, as I've not taken a day off in over a year. It might be just one day off, as I will have sketchbooks with me, and I am a sketchbook hoarder, so I plan on buying more there. 

Back to Prodigy: Part of why it takes so long is I draw several drafts with the original sketches in graphite first. The digital version is usually the most time-consuming part because I do everything with individual brush strokes. I'm not a fan of the automatic masking and gradient/color fill on any of these programs; I can never get things to blend the way they do if I use a paint tool and thousands of brush strokes per panel. For many of the early webcomics I drew, I attempted to use color fill to save time. However, I might have spent as much time trying to perfectly adjust the fill level and connect the ink to prevent the color from spilling over as I would have just blending with the watercolor or oil paint tools. Something that resulted from this was that I realized that by doing this, I did not have to close the ink, and by leaving it open, it conveys more of a sense of motion.