Socks and Puppets, the comic

Here is the Konsi art for October. It was a lot of fun!

Learnings from this year:

• I was surprised at the level of complexity I was able to maintain over the month – on average these images were significantly more ambitious than I’ve done in previous years. It’s good to know that I can reliably knock out images like these within a day.
• For a couple images, I added an extra step to my flow that I’ve tinkered with before. If I was unhappy with my lineart, due to wonky perspective or mistakes, I scanned it, fixed the lines digitally, then printed it back out to continue. It’s a lot of extra work, but the results were very good.
• I absolutely won’t be adding this step to my comic workflow, it’s quite a lot of extra work, but it’s worth remembering for larger pieces and commissions. It was especially helpful if my image was a little small to print it out larger, so I could more easily colour in details without smudges.
• I tinkered a little here and there with shading hard shadows rather than soft ones, and I think I’m getting a little better at them. It’s something I need to improve on, but I felt I made some steps.
• I significantly improved with drawing shoes and boots, especially at odd angles.
• I’ve always struggled with perspective, and depth, and in making dynamic poses. I think I improved a little – although many of these images still look flat.
• I still suck at drawing characters looking up, or down – I should make some active study of this, but I think I got an okay result once.
• My biggest issue drawing Konsi remains that I regularly draw her far too tall, often human-height. When looking at reference poses, it’s all too easy to copy the pose too well, resulting in a green human with pointy ears. I reckon this happened 2/3 of the time. Needs actively guarding against.

  Overall I’m happy with most of these, only one of the 31 images I think actively sucks (8. Umbrella) – the rest all have problems, but that’s inevitable when working this quickly and at the edge of my comfort zone.

  The challenge continues to provide me with useful learning, and remains fun to do