Process

Writing is so much easier than drawing.  There I said it.  Maybe it’s not that way for everyone, I don’t know.  But it’s much harder for me to translate what I see in my mind to the page in a visual rather than a verbal format.  Especially when I’m working with tools I haven’t mastered yet.

In related news, did you know that one can’t teach oneself to digitally paint in a day?  Funny thing.  On deviantart, one is always seeing these vivid and amazing digital paintings with captions like “Did this cus I wuz bored” of “Done in two hours. Dunno.”  These unhelpful captions prove deceptive, I tell you.  These artists, undermining themselves woefully with their words, have some amazing artistic or at the least technical skills that I am without.

And this explains what happened to the illustration that was supposed to appear last week.  I had a good composition, and drew it out in pencils, well and good, before noticing that I’d made Corin and Hellin the same height. D’oh.  Unable to let that go, and with a friend’s reassurance that I could rearrange it in Photoshop and print it on Bristol to paint on top of, I drew the illo up on three separate sheets, scanned and merged them properly and then learned that my printer hates Bristol and suffers from serious heavy paper indigestion.  Fine, I thought.  I shall paint this in Photoshop!

Ha! Ha ha ha HA!

No.

Maybe.

If I throw another 6 hours at it, maybe it will begin to be passable.  Or not.  I could have redrawn and painted it already in this time.

(Flips table.)

A picture may say more than a thousand words, but I can write well over a thousand words in the time it takes to paint a picture.

Frickin pictures.

Thank you, rant over.  Your scheduled chapter half will be on time.  As for an illustration, that remains to be seen.  Its fate now lies between me, my tablet and my God.