fredart : blogbits

Bweh. Last night i found myself twicking and twicking at the drawings over and over again as i adjusted and erased and modified the expressions, getting hung up on details and discarding frames and redrawing frames on 2nd and 3rd sheets of paper to be merged into the final comic when i scanned… and as it got later and i wondered and worried as i often do about the time it was taking.

The comic has been going well, but i’ve had a lot of trouble getting other things done. I’ve been trying to squeeze things into the day or two worth of time i have between comics - things like new products, a 2008 calendar, a few doujinshi projects i want to get under way, dealing with the Kodansha translations, trying to get to things with the new website, etc. My stubbornness about insisting on doing 3 comics per week is admirable, but looking at it from another point of view i wonder if i’ve been shooting myself in the proverbial foot all this time. Like that FexEx commercial where they wonder why they aren’t more productive. The woman suggests they get rid of the halfpipe, but the boss says no, the halfpipe stays.

There are two things i can do to make the MT comics work - by that i mean, I produce MT comics for free and i need to start working on other projects while MT is still going strong. I can simplify the art, reduce the time it takes to do them, or reduce the number of them that i do per week. I keep trying to simplify, but when i’m producing them i just can’t help but indulge in them - basically nullifying all attempts to reduce the time investment. Very noble, i suppose, but there are a lot of things that suffer. Rants, Blogs, Products, the Megagear store, products that i need to get designs finished for (so i can, like, support a family maybe?), personal life, getting things ready for our new baby… you get the idea.

The thing is, i don’t think that its the actual *production* time that is an issue. When i know exactly where the comic is going, when the script is solid and my vision of it is clear, it goes quickly. A fully developed comic with a finished script and layout can take 6-7 hrs to do, even with full backgrounds. I typically roll a lot of my development into the production, kind of a parallel processing thing. It’s very nice, but im beginning to think its a little indulgent and incredibly inefficient. If i am going to do 3 comics per week, i cant do long story development, short story development, dialoguing, drawing, and finishing all in the same day. That’s my halfpipe, and i think its got to go.

To do that, i think i need to do the one thing i have always considered off the table - go to a 2 comic per week schedule for a while. Each comic is taking a full day and a half to produce right now. thats 5 full days per week. Add all of the stuff we have to do related to the pregnancy, and… there isn’t anything left. No time for the store, no time for freewriting, sketching, story development, product development, ranting - anything. I need that time to add some balance and breathing room to the equation and stop being the indulgent, suffering “artist.”

I haven’t decided if im really going to drop to a 2 per week schedule yet, or for how long. I am this week - i need to regroup, finish the hatch on mondays comic, etc. This comic is mostly done, i have two frames to draw and dialogue to nail down. I’m gonna jump in and try to see if i can make some progress with some other things, things that have been needing attention for weeks.

Maybe it’s called getting realistic, im not sure. But maybe 2 regularly delivered comics with everything else you expect from these websites - rants, updates, etc - including some other projects like maybe ‘warmth’ getting off the ground (and that endgames doujin i want to do)… we’ll see.

I do work pretty hard, it’d just be nice to feel more of a sense of accomplishment more often. It might be more workable than than the way i normally deal with my productivity issues.

And one final test to see if i can get these trackbacks working to communicate with the MT site.

I’m working on a post for MT that talks about some of the differences between the kinds of pencils and erasers you can get in Japan compared to the pathetic selection they sell here in the states. I’ve been using .4mm pencils for my drawings lately, and i really like working with them. Since i can’t buy .4mm lead here in the states, i had Asmodeus pick up a selection of it, as well as some of the nice erasers (which you also can’t get here) and send it to me.

The fact that he sent it with a copy of Little Busters was really nice of him (I begged off getting the new key game because i have to start planning to buy toys for our little one, not toys for daddy :P) Even so, its a pretty nice little game, and oddly enough i was suprised to find myself seeing things in Natsume Rin that really clicked for me (maybe it’s the cats). (Wikipedia entry on Little Busters, and a really nice review of the game on Canned Dogs).

Sad thing is, i’m not even going to load up this game for a while, i just don’t have time to get sucked in Reviews from friends are good though.

Anyways, i took some pictures of them to use as a rant image, but you can go ahead and look at them if you are nice enough to be reading my poor neglected fredart blog. You’ll also note that i’m using a new camera, a Nikon D40x, which I just recently received as a gift (takes much better pictures than my first generation Canon Rebel :P)

Getting used to Quicksilver, and i’m finding one particularly nice thing about it - it’s helping to reduce my distractions. How? because i don’t have all of the programs running looking at me at the bottom of the screen all the time. I go and use programs when i decide to use them, not because i see it sitting there unlooked at for 10 minutes It’s really helpful in ignoring instant msg posts

And… this is the first post i’m trying with the alpha release of Ecto 3. So far so good, we’ll see if things explode when i post this

I’ve mentioned before that i’m a big fan of Literature and Latte’s Scrivner, it’s the most comfortable writing tool i’ve found so far and it’s helped me get as organized as i’ve ever been with my writing (which is a real feat, trust me :P). I’ve been using the stable release up until recently when i opted to try out the beta version to see what new features and tweaks are in the works… and there was one feature that really made my day. Being able to edit how the screenwriting modes work.

I’m sure there are standards for writing comic scripts, but i’ve never been exposed to them. I’ve been using my own various formats for years. I used to work in Microsoft Word, then i started working in plain text files (using a large variety of editors) and even tried a number of writing programs specifically made for the mac, like Ulysses. Prior to using Scrivener, my tool of choice was Omni Outliner, which worked out fairly well for scripting. Being an outlining tool, it wasn’t ideal for *writing*, specially for free writing, which i still did mostly in text based editors, like BBedit.

With Scrivener, not only does it give me some organizational tools, but the writing areas are very comfortable to work with. The full screen mode is wonderful (especially when you are as easily distracted as I am) and screenwriting mode was a feature that had me experimenting with it for writing comics.

It wasn’t ideal, of course, because if you have ever looked at script writing standards they are pretty plain looking - courier text, rigid formatting, etc. Great if you ever want to show your movie script to anyone in the business, but not really pleasant to look at if its just for yourself Also, i found it hard to experiment with dialogue because the way the tab/enter worked in going between Character, Dialogue, Action, etc, was not intuitive to the way i work. Still, it was worth experimenting with, and I learned to work with it.

The nicest feature of the new beta is that i can edit and tweak how the screenwriting formatting works. You can set your own parameters, fonts, even control how you switch between elements. There’s even a ‘comics’ format to start from.

Truth be told, i’m not really sure if you can do this with the stable release of scrivener. I don’t think i ever came across it. Regardless, i’m liking it very much

Other software that i’ve been happy with recently… the new release of Adium is quite nice and very stable (so nice to easily be able to change the menu icon), Ecto 3 is starting to surface (haven’t played with this alpha version yet) and Quicksilver, which i have installed and going to experiment with to see just what the hell it is supposed to do.

I do have an odd problem with QS on my macbook tho… it won’t load any of the plugins. It just stops, never loads them. I can’t figure out what the deal is - i’ve tried from a fresh boot up with no programs or other menu items running at all, i can’t figure out what is buggered. I guess i’ll figure it out eventually.

Upcoming software i’m looking forward to? Omni Focus.