Decided to break in my new Wacom Cintiq Tablet (!!) by painting the niece again.  The Cintiq is essentially a monitor combined with a graphics tablet, which allows you to draw and paint directly on the screen.

Here you can see I’m using my regular monitor to view my reference photo, as well as a wider view of the image I’m working on.

I think I inadvertently made Ariana look much older than she really is. Maybe I have a future doing age progressions for milk cartons.

This week’s homework assignment is a portrait with hands. Speaking of hands, mine are covered in charcoal.

The backstory for non-family members: Sam the Dog was my childhood creation. A sarcastic talking animal who lived with a bachelor owner and slept in a cat bed. (I believe my previous character was “One-ear the Sailin’ Dude.”)

I’m not saying I’m totally against reviving Sam, but if I did, I’d definitely want to rethink his character, kind of like how Frasier totally changed when he moved to Seattle.

And yes, I’ll watch out for lightning bolts tomorrow.

I’m doing these to familiarize myself with Manga Studio, a fantastic piece of software designed specifically for comic art. I’m also doing it to see how much work it takes to put a daily strip together. Not much, honestly. This one took under 2 hours from idea to posting, which is nothing compared to most of the stuff I’ve been trying lately. Obviously a lot of that has to do with the level of simplicity, but it also helps that inking is a breeze. In an all-paper workflow, I’d have to do a fairly finished pencil sketch, then carefully go over it with ink, thus removing most of the spontaneity from the drawing. Here, I can do a very rough sketch on paper, then a freehand “ink” drawing in Manga Studio.

So why do I even bother with paper? Because I’ve found that I’m much more likely to come up with an idea if I’m away from the computer. Sad, but true.