This is another piece like Sloth Darts, where the journey matched the subject! For some reason I found this comic a tough nut to crack but I stuck at it. One challenge was that I wanted to fit it onto one page. While I could’ve done this by just having the stones and the puddle with some explanation, I felt that characters would help give a personal connection and make the comic more of an encouraging illustration rather than just an instructive metaphor.
There were several attempts at the comic before hitting on the final one, the main contender getting quite advanced before I abandoned it. I started the earlier one with a really rough layout, which I made some equally rough changes to (the three layouts reveal a secret about me: I’m left-handed! I usually work from right to left so my hand doesn’t cover previous art). I combined these in Photoshop.
I thought I’d try out MyPaint so I did the linework with it, designing the characters as I went. Then I shifted to TwistedBrush for the colouring, where I hit a road-block; I couldn’t seem to picture the background! A pro would probably make something up without even blinking, which I can do sometimes, but not this time. The result? I abandoned it entirely (I also gave up on MyPaint. I liked the feel of it but it was lacking some important tools and the brushes were weird when scaled up. It’s changed since then, though).
An environment came to mind along with an altered layout. I experimented drawing the final linework on paper (again designing the characters as I went along) with pen and then with pencil (which I haven’t shown here because it’s just more lineart), gave up on that, then scanned the mixed results into TwistedBrush where I retraced the line art and coloured it. The rest (such as speech balloons and text) was added in Photoshop. There are things I wanted to adjust further, and I like some parts of the earlier version more than the later one, but I decided to combat my perfectionism by calling it finished.
Tags: colour, Comics, digital colour, digital painting, illustration, landscape, photoshop, twistedbrush