Chapter 4, Page 16
Hello! I’ve had a lot of life and grad school things going on, and haven’t been making new pages for a while. The time commitment was getting away from me, but I also have really (REALLY) missed drawing them. So for a bit, to see how it goes, I’m gonna try doing pages on a… I probably can’t promise totally weekly, but at least more regular basis in this sorta-grayscale form.* I will with high confidence go back and make them full color eventually (it is taking all my willpower not to try and color these Right Now, honestly.) But I think decoupling that from the rest of the page-making timeline will help with how my life and free time are playing out at this moment
In the meantime, here is a playlist of car chase songs to accompany the car chase vibes:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1TumNvbq90NgdY5tWOXB2c?si=a85d7196844845a3
*Just some speculation and Craft thoughts – coloring was becoming the big time-sink in making new pages, and my anxiety about it was becoming a deterrent from drawing them. I think both because I was really pushing myself to get better at it, and because I let myself get into some bad habits. As the coloring gets more complex, I’ve learned, it gets easier to kick the can down the road on Big Decisions about composition, legibility, that kind of thing? So I was increasingly going into the coloring stage with “problems” I hadn’t figured out how to fix at any previous stage. I learned a lot that way, but it was taking a LOT of energy, and more and more of the effort was getting dumped on that last stage as my standards got higher. The goal here is both to short-circuit that habit, and to practice getting pages into a state where doing the coloring is easier.**
** Also, this kind of half-colored state, with just a few values and “plot necessary” colors, is… honestly something I should’ve been doing anyway? It’s a stage I put pages that are “hard” to color through, (though often later in the drawing process than I should) and is a useful reference for making decisions once I hit the “anything is possible, what the heck do I do” hurdle. I often skip it because it feels like useless work if no one’s gonna see it, but it’s a kind of planning I probably don’t do enough.***
***Idk why this post has put me into my ‘nested footnotes’ writing mode. Thanks for sticking with me on this footnote journey.
I would gladly forego coloring if it meant you were drawing! I do like the idea of “plot-necessary” colors.
I once wrote an email for a group that had no less than six nested parenthetical components. I was likely inspired by Sir Terry Pratchett, who more than once had a series of nested footnotes in his Discworld books.