Key reflections

I’m very, very tired! It’s been a big commitment time wise, despite all best intentions and planning in the preceding week. I’m not sure how much more I could have done beyond getting a week ahead with the pencils for each day. I clearly work very slowly at the moment, this is mainly down to a stubborn perfectionist streak exasperated by being very rusty and having poor execution.Last but not least… Finished, not perfect. Finished, not perfect. Finished, not perfect. Finished, not perfect. Finished, not perfect… this really is a hard one to take on board.

Inking late at night is hard! Given how much time it takes to get the drawing where it needs to be it invariably means I’m inking late into the night, not ideal circumstances for producing my best inking work.

You can never have enough design prep. Fortunately I had additional time at the weekend to invest in designing the Chicken creature on days 5 and 6. Had that task fallen on a weeknight I would have really struggled. Ideally I would have had the design resolved going into the first week so I could spend last weekend looking ahead into week two.

I would have liked to have done one or two warm-up pieces. I felt like I was still blowing away the cobwebs with the first two days, though it did start to click from day 3 onwards.

Stop doing

Being overly ambitious with environments. With this story the environment is essentially a character and requires some thought. However, I lost a lot of time to environmental considerations this week.
Being a perfectionist and brute forcing craft shortcomings by throwing an unsustainable amount of time at problems.
Sacrificing other important things. I stopped running last week which is no good.

Start doing

Get a day ahead with pencils. The plan being, I pencil the next days picture the night before, and ink it the next morning when I’m fresh.
Be more practical designing backgrounds, use more reference. What’s most important to the story, what isn’t?
Be more efficient with rendering backgrounds.
Make more of the weekends. I had to work over the weekend which limited the amount of time I wanted to spend preparing for the following week.

Continue doing

Writing the next weeks worth of journal entries. Whilst they have eventually changed to reflect what I’ve drawn they act as a great guide to what I should be doing day to day. And without this ability to look ahead it would be a lot harder maintain focus and weave simple narrative threads.
Exploring new techniques. Whilst this is potentially time consuming it’s also one of the main points of the exercise for me. To learn about different approaches to getting desired outcomes with inking. Whilst it might breed inconsistency over the 31 days as my approaches change I’ll learn a lot more.

View my progress over at Instagram