Ep. 21, Page 35

smbhax on Jan. 19, 2014

So because I was frustrated slightly more than usual with yesterday's page, I of course got to dreaming up some miraculous solution in the form of an art materials change. This started taking a definite direction when right before bed last night I did this little marker pen ink sketch

which was kind of fun and for not the first time I thought yeah see I could just do the whole comic in this combination of large and small black markers. Look how sharp and easy it is! I could probably even do multiple pages per day! That thought is not unusual but this time I went a step further and thought hm well full-size pen sketching hasn't worked that well, but WHAT IF I were to say make the page smaller, like the size of this sketch? How could that not work? So this afternoon I cut out some 9.25“ x 3.9” pieces of my favorite marker paper–much tinier, you see, than A*'s usual 16“ x 6.75” pages–and I'd had the additional brain stroke that at this particular 9.25" width, they just fit neatly into regular #10 business envelopes, so I could offer free shipping when I sell them, instead of having to ship them expensively in a box. And I wouldn't even have to go down to the post office to do it! Bonus!
The problem with this plan of course, as I have proven to myself more than once in the past, is that it doesn't work: I can't do much more than a simple non-specific character pose in a sketch, at least not on purpose. So like when I took a shot at drawing today's A* scene straight out in pen on these tiny pages, I could do the dude by himself okay

but as soon as I tried to add the figure of Selenis' self-declared friend in relation to that, and in a more complicated pose (the layout I was trying at first was somewhat different, but in any case some perspective was still involved), the drawing just refused to work itself out neatly, and I went through four or five tries before giving up and going back to start in on my usual 16" page with a pencil and lots of erasing.
I still dream of doing an awesome off-the-cuff sketch comic…but uh yeah I apparently am not really able to make that happen. Maybe if I keep practice-sketching away, some day…
Hm I suppose one way to manage it would be to switch to more like a square page size, so as to just focus on one character per page/panel. I don't think I'm particularly anxious to do that, though.