Personal Milestones

So, on Sunday 26th January, The W Word turned 1 year old. I put a celebratory picture up, but unless you are in a habit of checking the page daily or follow the comic on tumblr then you may not have seen it, so here it is:

Whilst the archive isn't huge - going from twice-a-week to once-a-week updates due to moving house and losing my buffer, along with changing the way I made the comics to a process that gave better results but took longer, means that it's quite easy to click through the entire comic in a matter of minutes.

But I've never stuck with something this long under my own steam, so I'm allowing myself to feel a bit proud of myself, and giving myself this post to be congratulatory.

Statistics
73 Comics drawn specifically for W Word, 1 older filler comic and 1 first birthday card.
30 followers on comicfury, 32 on Tumblr.
8140 unique visitors on comicfury, with 67,448 pages viewed, and average strip rating of 4.85/5.
Highest number of comicfury hits per day - 62, 3rd January 2014
Highest number of notes on tumblr - 80, on this strip.
1199 pageviews on the blog (yay!)

I know the numbers aren't massive in terms of just about anything else on the internet, but hell, I know that the majority of those are from people I don't know. Like, these aren't just family or friends who are reading out of politeness and a sense of obligation. These are people from elsewhere in the world who feel that I have something to say that is of interest to them. Who are willing to put up with my all-thumbs approach to practising my art and scripting, and (hopefully!) enjoy what they see.

These numbers are a great boost to my self-confidence, and have really helped with my self-discipline to stick with this project. I've committed to it, and now I feel like there are people who are at least somewhat invested in it, I've got to keep going and see it through, unlike previous attempts where I did like four comics and got bored.

I've also been making a point of going back and reading through the archives of popular comics on the internet and seeing how their art styles changed and matured with practice and experience, and I've been getting good at learning how that's fine. It was one of those things that I accepted easily in other people, but not in my own art. Maintaining this for a year has helped me to see the change in my art, and feel my skills change, and give me the confidence to start challenging myself slowly and developing.


So, in honour of my first birthday, I'd like to share with you some of the comics that have always inspired me to want to join the ranks of webcomic artists, and whose work I love and admire greatly.



Bad Machinery
I've been reading John Allison's work since I was in high school, at least a decade ago now, and I've seen his art and storytelling style change through three different, but wonderfully interlinked webcomics. Personally I'd recommend going right back to the start and reading everything from Bobbins onwards, but I'm biased. I own so much of his stuff too, like 6 t-shirts, a book and two or three mini-comics. His designs are amazing and his fictional teen girl characters dress better than I do.

Girls with Slingshots
Danielle Corsetto has a wonderful sense of humour and a delightful appreciation for the wonders of alcohol. Her ability to portray detail with comparatively simple lines is a thing of beauty, and her facial expressions are amazing. Recently I've also been really enjoying how she's been mixing up camera angles and panel composition, which has inspired me somewhat, although I'm not skilled enough yet to achieve it quite as well!

Stop Paying Attention
Lucy Knisley has a wonderful way of observing the world around her, and it was her work that made me realise that journal-comics could be a thing, although I've never had the skill or the patience to create the sort of thoughtful and insightful comics she draws. She also does some wonderful travelogues and yummy recipes.

Nimona
I actually only discovered Nimona fairly recently, but I fell totally in love with Noelle Stephenson's art style, and the doodles on her tumblr are just the best.



So go, read and enjoy these wonderful comics!  And thank you all for your support over this last year, I hope you'll stick around for the future!

Let's talk about ~art~

Realistically, I'm aware that most of you have found your way here because of my amazing comic. That's cool, pictures are easier than blogs anyway. But that also means there's a fair chance that some people here are not all that bothered about weddingy things, but would actually like to know about drawing, and stuff like that.

So.

You may not have noticed, but since strip #34, I have been doing each strip completely digitally. Prior to that I had started initially by sketching the comic in pencil and inking by hand, then scanning and (when I started colouring the strips), RE-inking digitally (until I realised that was really timeconsuming and stopped inking by hand) and then colouring.


I am quite pleased with the way the comics have turned out since I moved entirely digital, although I can still see room for improvement and all the flaws stand out!  But this has always been the case since I was a kid.

As a child, my first artistic guidance came from this man:

 (Neil Buchanan - Art Attack, CITV)

Tragically, and repeatedly, however hard I tried to copy the techniques he showed me, they never looked quite as good when I did them. I'd have this massively complex picture in my head, and knew exactly how to draw it, but when I imagined this:

What I usually got ended up more like this:

As I got older, I got more and more frustrated between this total lack of communication between my hand and my brain.

I leaned more towards writing and stuck to just idle doodling instead of looking to improve my techniques and look at the problems with what I was drawing. I got a B in GCSE Art, and looking back I think that was generous. I was so focussed on anime styles in art at that point, simplistic lines and static poses. If I could go back and do it again, I think I'd do better.




I know now that my art isn't exactly complex, or super-dynamic, but the difference is that now at least I'm experimenting more and trying new things. One of the criticisms my art teacher gave me during GCSE was that I worked too small (fair - I tended to centre one tiny image on a page), and that I was afraid to be messy.

I was afraid to be messy - aside from doodling on my notes in class, I didn't have any rough sketchbooks, like the great warm-up doodles that you see artists showing on tumblr, I was afraid to practice and try new things in case it went wrong, and so I stuck with simple lines and simple poses to  make sure I met a similar quality of work every time, even though that was boring. I didn't experiment. Everything was flat.

And everything was tiny. I used to put all my effort of composition into a single central figure in the middle of the page, and then filled in the blanks around them. To a point I still do that - but now I'm trying to build it up, and I'm aware it's a problem!

I started to change that when I got my set of markers a couple of years ago. Yes, if you looked through my back catalogue you'd find the odd piece of work where actually I've considered composition:

But mostly it's one lonely figure floating in a heavy fog.

With my markers I started trying to build up backgrounds and textures, playing more with shading and highlights and trying to get a more rounded and finished image.

But there was still something not right about it - I was pleased with it, but it didn't feel quite perfect. It didn't feel as revolutionary as I'd hoped it would. I'd done the same thing I'd always done - drawn the pencil, coloured between the lines, and it was still aping that anime style, badly.

I don't think I got a sense of what I wanted to do, what I needed to do with my art, until I did Batbride.

This wasn't initially intended to be a strip, it was just going to be a silly poster. And I just got messy with it. I referenced a pose from SenshiStock and I challenged myself to sketch it entirely on tablet, and that scared me, so to provide a 'crutch' for myself, I did an initial Very Rough sketch in one colour, then layered over a Less Rough sketch it another before I would look at setting down the final lines.

But after that, the background was my real challenge - that was when I got messy. I played with different brushes, different colours, different layers and different opacities. And I didn't erase anything. If something went wrong I painted over it or played with some effects. It was somewhat liberating and really quite fun.


I'm still not at the point where I can confidently say that my art is my art, but now I'm being braver with my composition, with my sketching, and I'm pushing myself to be messy, supporting myself with reference pictures, and I'm starting to see a style that is uniquely mine begin to evolve and show itself around the edges.

The course of action now is to just keep drawing, and wait to see what happens!