2021-03-13 14:42
Made two comics in the past two days. Had to revert to an older version of Krita to avoid the bug that was messing me up. Pulled out an old 4 panel strip template from November of 2014 and made use of some screencaps I took from Shanghai Express. Feels good to be working on something, even though it's a bit slow as I figure out both how Krita works and remember how a bunch of these general features work (like layer masks and filters and all that stuff). I guess these are the first comics I've made since November of 2015, as that's the latest dated reference in my "Comics" folder. Looking back at those, I can see myself struggling with where to go and what to do. I was trying out a different format (portrait page, one big panel with three panels under/over it) and some different techniques. For the most part they didn't/don't work.
The comics from this week work ok. I've decided to try to work on them as a kind of versioning process. Instead of starting with a new blank template, I'm starting with the previous comic. I don't know how long I can keep that up (I guess I could just remove almost everything from the file one day), but I'd like to see how... refining the comic goes. How transforming it a few steps at a time goes. I can look at and think about what works, what I like, what I don't, and then add something new, take away parts, edit parts. Over some amount of time I should end up with a comic that has almost no relation to the first one and then, if I keep it up, later, a comic that has almost no relation to that one.
I'm liking Krita a lot (minus that bug that messed me up the other day). It's free, open source, and really full of features. It certainly seems better suited for drawing than say, Photoshop. And so far it's working fine for me in my use of photos. And it supports my Huion tablet's pressure sensitivity.