A Before and After with Buddy Butterfly

95/365

I believe I improved my drawing of Buddy flying to the chimney. The first version looked like he was lying flat on the roof instead of flying above it.

Somedays Everthing Slows Down to a Crawl

94/365

Not much progress today. At least, not as much as I wanted. The switch from Sketchbook to Photoshop is giving me bad dreams. I feel like I’m trying to run through hardening cement. The feeling of frustration and impatience penetrates my dreams. I’m dreaming of color palettes these days. Whenever I’m learning something intense and under pressure, my dreams become vivid.

The high point of my day was supporting Shoo Rayner on Patreon. He’s a great children’s book illustrator and author, and he shares everything about his process. I chose the $15 level so that I can watch his process videos, including preparing his books for IngramSpark and his Affinity Photo videos.

I completed this painting today, but it doesn’t feel complete. However, seeing this picture as it will appear on the printed page, I like it more than I thought I would. This is the first time I’ve backed off and viewed it a print size, and it looks good to me. Perhaps I spent too much time poring over every pixel at 400% magnification. When I do that the warts look like mountains.

ETA: I backed off my $15 patronage to $1. Unfortunately, Shoo hasn’t put the IngramSpark videos on Patreon yet. He’s a cool guy and I know he’ll come through. When he does, I’ll go back to the $15 level because I really want to see how he prepares his books for IngramSpark!

Another Work In Progress: Momma Jay Meets the House Owner

93/365

The big news today is that I admitted to myself that I won’t meet my March 31 deadline, no matter how positive I’m feeling about my progress. I have 8 to 10 more paintings to finish and I have to learn enough InDesign to create a simple layout with text and images. Once that’s don I have to go through the IngramSpark learning process — I have no idea how long that will take. So, I decided to the sane thing and create a realistic schedule based on my available time and skills. In the end, I extended my deadline by two weeks to April 15th.

Work in progress

Our Heroes Emerge from Desperate Straits

92/365

I colored today’s drawing in Photoshop rather than Sketchbook. It went okay, but I had to do without a few of Sketchbook’s really handy features. In Sketchbook you can switch to the previous brush by hitting “S”. But in Photoshop there’s no way to switch to the previous tool—you have to back to the brush palette. The other Sketchbook feature I missed, my favorite in fact, was the built-in Copic color palette that shows the complements of every selected color. There’s nothing like that in Photoshop, as far as I know. My workaround was to do a screen print of the Sketchbook Copic palette, open it in Photoshop, and select colors from that. Poor me—I have so many grass-is-greener problems! Wherever you go, you’re gonna have problems.

My Conscious Attempt to Lead the Viewer's Eye Through a Painting

90/365

In this picture I intentionally combined four separate paintings into one painting, with one scene leading into another and ending at the bottom left corner. The four scenes show the boys riding bikes, playing football, playing cards, and listening to tunes in the pool.

Finished King of the World Painting

89/365

I worked on this picture for two days. My big issues were: unwittingly painting colors on the line work layer, deleting a layer of colors and not being able to recover it, not naming the layers. And more. I’m learning a lot about the necessity of well-organized layers. Folders for layers would be a big help, but I don’t see that feature in Sketchbook.

The wings, the wings! And Buddy has four fingers in this picture. In other pictures he has five!

Buddy Butterfly feeling like the King of the World

88/365

I did something wacky today. After spending days setting up custom Sketchbook brush libraries, I got the crazy idea to reset everything to their default settings. I was warned with a big pop-up window that everything would go back the Sketchbook’s original settings. But I didn’t listen. I pushed the reset button. Everything went back to normal and all of my installed brushes and custom libraries disappeared. I wasted an hour reinstalling the brushes I had been using.

And so, here’s today’s half-finished painting. Why do I decide to go on these whimsical, time-wasting expeditions of foolishness when I’m on a tight deadline? The answer is uncountable thousands of times.

Jimmy Experiences the Pain of Following His Conscience

87/365

In this image I’m trying to capture the uncomfortable feeling of heeding your conscience when you really want to please your best friend.

Day 86 -- More of the Same

86/365

Today I completed yesterday’s drawing, and colored the picture of Jimmy Jay afraid that his pal Buddy Butterfly has gone one step too far.

In the meantime, I read “Wabi Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets, and Philosophers” for the sixth time. It’s a great book, if you’re an artist, designer, poet, or philosopher. I’m qualified to read the book because I’m a little bit of each, sometimes.

The grid layout doesn’t work well with these images, and that may be a clue that they won’t look right when I lay them out in inDesign. That will be interesting! It’s looking like I’ll have to draw more of Momma Jay’s body and the rest of Buddy’s wings.

A Butterfly Takes the Blame

85/365

Today’s image is a work in progress. I tried to put a little detail into Buddy Butterfly, with some veins in his wings and a little shading. Details eat up my time, especially when I don’t know what I’m doing when I’m learning how to operate a new program.

Enough chit chat. The dogs are waiting for me. They say I’ve got to take a shower and get ready for Second Family Hour.

I ran out of time… I’ll finish this tomorrow.