Who has flat feet and has posted to this site daily for a full year? [Awkward roundhouse kick]  This guy!!!

On the left are some drawings from 2011, 2012 on the right. So my improvement has been…subtle. If nothing else, I’ve improved my ability to draw quickly and with less frustration. My painting skills are noticeably better. So is my gesture drawing ability. Animation, sadly, has fallen by the wayside, but only because it’s so freaking time-consuming. I still love it and aspire to make a go of it.

Anyway, I know I have a very small core of readers, 50% of whom are my parents, but I’d like to thank everyone for their encouragement over the last year. Even though I generally raise a big skeptical eyebrow to compliments, your response has driven me to forge ahead with my harebrained “get rich slowly” scheme to become the Grandma Moses of my generation. Grazie mille.

Or as the makers of Clip Studio call him, lunch.

I drew this from start to finish in that software I was raving about yesterday. I had nothing better to draw, so this one’s in honor of my niece, who, when she heard I live alone, suggested I get a fish!

Why is this man smiling? Well, besides a night on the town with good company and alcohol, it’s because he impulsively bought a really cool piece of software. In fact, it’s so obscure, there’s not even an official English version at the moment.

Clip Studio Paint Pro comes from Celsys, a Japanese company that also produces a piece of software called Comic Studio, which is marketed in the U.S. by Smith Micro as Manga Studio. That’s the software I’ve used for my fleeting attempts at comic strips.

Honestly, I probably could have stuck with Manga Studio for the type of stuff I want to do, but it hasn’t had a major update in years, and in a way Clip Studio seems like a natural successor. It doesn’t have every feature of Manga Studio, especially the Pagemaker-type stuff that print-based cartoonists require, but it has everything necessary for a web comic, including the ability to make adjustable panels and perspective rulers. Beyond that, the interface is a little more intuitive and broader in scope, especially if you’re used to painting in Photoshop. The pen tool is great as always, and the brush tool is more sophisticated. Graphics performance is also improved; for instance, lines look smooth at any zoom level, whereas Manga Studio looks best in zoom increments of 25%.

The only gotcha is that the interface is entirely in Japanese; luckily some enterprising folks have come up with a patch that changes 90% of the menus to English. But I hope there’s enough interest to get Celsys or Smith Micro to offer an English-language version soon.

I took one of my quick gestures from the coffee shop this morning and fleshed it out a little.