Week 4

For the first part of the week, I mainly focused on studying from my art books (Tokyo Storefronts and Tokyo at Night by Mateusz Urbanowicz) and my favorite process videos (particularly this one, a gorgeous illustration of a futuristic megacity done in photoshop.) From them, I was able to get a better sense of architecture, lighting, and how to capture more industrial textures with digital brushes. 

In the later part of the week, I primarily working on coloring the pride months illustration for The Kava Cauldron. Coloring is typically less physically strenuous than drawing line art, so it was easier on my hands that way. It was also nice to get to try out some new lighting techniques on Clip Studio Paint since I usually don't have the time to do that for every panel of the comic. Figuring out how to put the flags' colors into their outfits was a very fun challenge, and so was figuring out how to keep the colors from clashing. Overall, I actually thought it turned out really cute and had a lot of fun coloring it.

Overall, if I could go back in time to when I decided on my project, I would probably change it to working only on The Kava Cauldron. The upcoming episodes are very background-heavy, so even if I didn't have the line art from Sarah I could've worked ahead and also accomplished my goal of drawing detailed enviroments. As it is, I learned a lot about drawing enviroments, which is incredibly valuable of course, but I don't have as much work to show for it as I originally planned to. Even though I've improved a lot, I feel like I kind of failed to achieve my original goal. 

My project was likely too ambitious given my current skill level and outside drawing workload (the comic). I definitely overestimated how efficient I would be in the span of a month without totally killing my hand in the process. I think someone much more familiar with the type of illustration I was doing (hyper-detailed city environments) without other drawing projects could have finished the Portland piece in about two weeks if they worked on it 25 hours a week (estimate based on how long other artists have said similarly-sized projects took them). Unfortunately, that was not my situation for this project, and I wish I had taken that into consideration a little more before committing to such a big project. 

Regardless, I'm still committed to finishing my illustration, and I will absolutely find a way to share it once I do.

In the meantime, here is the finished LGBTQ+ pride illustration, plus the color palette I used for the flags. The line art was drawn by Sarah and the colors were done by me.

If you're curious, the characters (and their flags) from left to right on the top are Diana (Pan), Malachi (Bi), Liam (Gay), Esmeralda (Lesbian), and Sean (Ace) is at the bottom.