Week 3 (was meant to go up earlier)

This week I finished up my work on episode 8 of The Kava Cauldron and uploaded it, then continued working on my downtown Portland illustration. I was feeling really under the weather most of this week and my hand was hurting, so I was a lot less productive than I had intended to be. Still, it always feels nice to publish an episode, so that was a nice way to start the week. 

I had a lot of trouble with this particular section of the Portland illustration. While it may have been partially due to me not feeling well, I actually don't think that was the real problem. One thing I learned through this project, especially this week, is that Procreate, the program I used for this particular piece, might not have been the best tool for such a detailed illustration. 

Procreate is a great program, used by professional artists and beginners alike, but I think its limits become apparent when you need a lot of detail (pixels) and a lot of layers. Because my drawing has so many pixels, I can only have 12 layers at a time, which really constricts my ability to make changes or adjustments to what I've already drawn and makes it harder to fix mistakes. It also means that everything in the far background (image 1) is very pixelated and harder for me to draw. I honestly think it was easier to do the sections that are closer up (like image 2 + my previous post) because the section I did during my first week was closer and a lot easier for me to do despite taking up a lot more space in the image. 

All in all, I'm not feeling great about my progress with my original goal of finishing the Portland piece. There is still a lot to go, and I intend to finish it, but it's pretty unlikely that that will happen before my project time ends. In the meantime, I think I'm going to give my hand a bit of a break next week and spend some more time studying how my favorite artists draw backgrounds rather than drawing them myself.