Doodling without sketching

Recently, I've discovered a skill that I want to put in a lot of my time and dedication into. And that skill is being able to draw my characters without there needing to draw a detailed sketch underneath. 

In other words, I want something like a "dumbed down" version of my art style so that I can quickly make little comic strips and shorts. This would especially be useful for if the comic is just a small scenario, usually for some quick laughs or for just to tell a moment.

Here are some of my attempts:

A dynamic pose

I may include "noodle arms" on occasion

This skill of drawing with minimal sketching should also be able to help me in creating strong character design, too. If I have too much detail in a character, I would either forget to include them or I would struggle to add them without having to erase what goes underneath it. This is especially useful because in comics, I would have to keep drawing the same characters over and over. 

It was actually only not too long ago when I realised I could apply drawing without sketching to my art. At the time of writing this post, my current media of interest is the TV series, We Bare Bears. This series was my main motivation to practice the skill.

We Bare Bears by Daniel Chong

I was looking at the art style used to draw the bears themselves and I noticed how simplistic yet strong and memorable they were. Eventually, I doodled them on paper and I loved how easy it was. 

I eventually found the webcomic that inspired We Bare Bears: "The Three Bare Bears" and this was the hammer to the nail. I want to make dumb little comics, but I don't want to have to put as much time and effort into them as my more ambitious projects. This was the inspiration of the motivation.

The Three Bare Bears webcomic by Daniel Chong

I'll wish myself luck!

Drawing backgrounds

For some time, I've been trying to figure out how to draw backgrounds with detail, but at the same time, make them quick and easy to draw. 

There's a technique that I noticed in some cartoons where detailed backgrounds are painted with an "imperfect" sort of feel to it. The lines are mostly loose. The colours focus more in lighting & shadows, sometimes not even in line with the lineart. The main subjects are drawn normally with minimal shading and details. See what I mean, here. 

I kind of took some inspiration from that. I found that painting areas where there would be a lot of detail was a lot quicker and efficient than drawing every detail in the picture. I also found that painting with a more transparent brush that mimics how pain works in real life was quicker than cel shading because I could be looser and more laid-back.

A realisation

Lately, I just hadn't been feeling the best I coul've been. Lately I've been feeling kind of down. Everything just felt slower and sometimes I was even finding it difficult to look forward to the day. This has been affecting many important aspects of my life, including working on my comics. 

When it came to working on my Mydan project, the uploads had been extended to being a page per week, which is, considering my process for drawing up each page, not enough. After each upload, I tell myself I can do better and I try to find motivation. But even so, I never improve.

Becase of this, I had been trying to find what I have been missing. What sort of things motivate me to do more? What can I do to make each day count? It took me forever, but now, it's finally hit me. What I found was lacking was that I wasn't really putting as much visual direction into my pages as much as I used to. 

I forgot about the fact that almost every panel (or "shot") shoud have its own character. And because I forgot about that, when I would draw, there would bee a sort of "stale" feeling. It felt like a chore to get to the next pages. I forgot about the media that I drew inspiration from and I forgot how to bring my heart and soul into my project.

Now that I've learned that, I feel like I've cleared an obstacle out of the way. All that's left is to find the motivation to take action...

Nearing the end of the semester

If you've seen my last post, then you'd know that I had made the decision to focus mostly on my uni stuff. So far, that's been going well! Two of the major assignments that I've done in the past month are done and submitted, which means I can finally go back to the old routine. The semester is nearly ending and I only have two small assignments left to go, so I'm pretty confident.

However, although I'd just been focusing on uni for the most part, I've managed to find some spare time to really put in extra thoughts on my projects, especially Mydan. In my daydreams, I've really just been polishing some coming scenes and refining characters, mainly just so my future writing on the project won't get too messy.

I've also noticed that recently I've been taking most of my inspiration from video games, one of them being MOTHER or EarthBound Beginnings, as well as the rest of the MOTHER series. I'm not necessarily talking about how Kamilla's got a bit of her inspired by Lloyd and Ruwei by Ninten, but mainly its more game-like elements. For instance, how the protagonists are accompanied by a party that follow an archetype of some sort (although there will only be two main characters: Kamilla & Ruwei). Another, for a more specific example, is Kamilla mending broken machines overnight similarly to how Jeff does in EarthBound. I just thought that would be a nice thing to add.

Being careful with my pacing

As you'd expect, working on a long-term creative project and studying (whether it be uni or high school) is pretty much a bad idea. But, I'm still working on my projects anyway xD Although things have been slow, I've managed to make some progress in Mydan: basically, I've done all the concept art needed for the next scene. I hope to start the first scene of Chapter 1 real soon! If you want to keep up with my progress for Mydan in "real-time", I have a tag on a Tumblr blog for that which can be viewed Here.

Remember Kamilla?

Anyways, moving on to other important things: I've been trying to focus on uni a lot more lately. In the past year, my motivation to do my work has been kind of getting worse, and it sucks. And so, before I hopefully take a break for some time next year, I at least want to make my work before then have at least SOME quality. So! In other words, hopefully in a couple months, progress will start to speed up again. Wishing myself luck in my studies for now :'D

Also, I wanted to quickly mention a book that I've been completely into this year: it's a speculative biology scifi titled All Tomorrows by C.M. Kosemen. To summarise the narrative briefly, it basically follows the future of humanity and involves a lot of body horror, unique civilisations, hope and doom. It has become quite an inspiration for me and my own sci-fi writing, and has especially helped grow my interest in developing the alien civilisations that I've created for my universe. By the way, All Tomorrows is completely free to read, and there's even a nice audiobook reading of it on YouTube!

Mydan's prologue and other things

The prologue for Mydan is officially complete. It took me a couple months, but I'm just happy it's done :D Although I'm proud of how it turned out in general, there are a few things that I want to change/add to help things be a bit more clear. Hopefully, I'll find time for doing that in the future, since right now I want to get started on chapter 1. I'm also thinking about doing some ending art for after each chapter, and my next task is to get started on doing that. Anyways, wishing myself luck on future progress.

The prologue is over!

On the side, I've been coming up with ideas for, as well as drawing up, some small slice-of-life/gag comics with some of my characters. I've already completed one with some characters from Gone Unsupervised, which you can view HERE. From the way that the latest comic looks, I feel like that will be the way I'll be drawing up comics under GU from now on. I've had these characters for a long time and I've always wanted to make an ongoing, consistent comic with them. I might as well make the comic process easy, even though it sacrifices some of its visual quality.

Ben (left) and Felix (right) in their first official comic together

Also, uni's back on my tail (as expected). This means that I'll have to put my projects to a lower priority for now, which sucks big time. I only have two subjects for this semester to make things a little easier for me, but I'm still not doing too hot. All I can do now is just put in more effort into focusing on uni stuff, which is hard, therefore taking some time off my projects for a bit. That's not to say my projects are going to be totally dead for some time though - things are just going to get a little slower.

Progress!

The prologue of Mydan is nearly coming to an end, which can only mean the (hopefully) soon arrival of the comic's first chapter. Although it hasn't been too long since I started (since about May 2022), I'm glad that I was able to make it this far. That's because it seems that almost every time I make an attempt to start a comic series (heck, even a comic short) I always end up losing motivation and putting it off for who knows how long. Guess you could say Mydan could be the one that stays for long. Honestly, who knows? But nonetheless, I'm pretty confident in this series :P

Also, it was in the past week/fortnight that I've had a couple of big motivation-boosts! First, on the 3rd of August, a close friend of mine shared my project sites to their class at university as an example for whatever it was their course was focusing on, and I couldn't be more thankful. And if THAT wasn't enough, I only learned just yesterday that Mydan was featured on the homepage of The Duck, a webcomics hosting site that I post on. Words cannot describe how happy I was at that. I've never felt so aknowledged before, and there's the bonus points that I don't really promote my stuff much. Here's the link to the feature: https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2022/aug/09/featured-comic-mydan-post-beginnings/

YEAH BABY, there's my lil boy!!!