Drawing the Panels Faster

Now that I'm employed again (I was unemployed for 12 weeks until now), I have less time to work on Sami's Dojo. Fortunately, though, drawing episodes with over 20 panels has taught me to work fast. I was drawing something like 2-3 panels in a hour before. Now, I'm able to sketch and ink 6 panels in an hour, while eating lunch. Making the decision to switch from graphite pencil for sketching to photo blue has taken away the erasing time that was eating up my time before. I think that was a good call.

I'm hoping that I can still create longer updates for my comic, even though I have a full-time job, now. This week's episode is something like 30+ panels long, so we'll see how I'll do. I might switch update days from Fridays to Saturdays. And although I can draw maybe 8 panels in a day over lunch time and my breaks, that still leaves the coloring time. After I finish The Lantern, I should be able to color faster, since I won't have to add shadows on top of the color.

Creating this comic, with an actual plot, has been a great learning and growing experience. Now that I'm getting used to sketching again, after the long break I took after graduating, I'm getting better at creating interesting and more dynamic poses for my characters in each panel. I won't claim that I'm excellent at it, but I've got Araki Hirohiko as my inspiration, so maybe soon.

Thanks for reading!

Manga in Theory and Practice Helps Me Write Character Sheets!

One of my absolute favorite books on writing is Araki Hirihiko's Manga in Theory and Practice: The Craft of Creating Manga. I've read a lot of books on writing, but this one really speaks to me. I've learned some pretty solid story principles from Araki that I've not learned anywhere else. One of the many neat things in his book is a character sheet template that he provides. I decided to print out 7 of them to fill out for my six main characters and another, secret, seventh character.

I'm looking forward to when you all can read about him! If I even get any readers, haha. :P