For better or worse, I decided to make drawing a part of the execution for my bootstrapped project. I'm not a great artist, so this involves some research and practice, not just execution of things I've done many many times.

A bad idea

There are many paths worth not pursuing, and in truth, this could easily be one. When it comes to supporting an online service as I plan to, adding needless complexity is probably the worst thing you can do.

As a personal example of this, I previously built a (now more or less shelved) game building competition site called Fight Magic Run. I loved many aspects of it. Seeing all the games that people created was amazing, and it was small enough to have a good core crowd, without the community getting impersonal or nasty. On a side note, I'd really like to give that site another shot at some point.

Anyways, that site was generally fun to run, but I added a constraint to it that made it much more time consuming than need be. That constraint was using node and express (which I am okay at), rather than rails, in which I'm extremely comfortable. It wasn't a big enough problem to sink the project, but it probably didn't help. I learned a lesson that if I'm concerned mostly with execution, I should only use things I am very comfortable with.

The same mistake again?

So while I'm generally opposed to creating artificial barriers to completing a project, and especially wary of choosing tools in which I am a non-expert, improving my drawing skills is a consistent goal of mine. However, that justification is also not enough to take this path.

There is an actual execution-based reason for this.

Marketing

I suck at marketing. I don't mind writing blog posts. I don't mind mentioning them on twitter or reddit or whatever (although the reddit bureaucracy, "reddiquite" of non-self promotion leaves it as a very unfriendly place for those who aren't already gilded producers, consumers, or snarkmongers).

The other thing working against "content marketing" in my case is that I'm building a service for people with a more cynical worldview than allows for direct celebration of the thing itself. "Getting a job" is a happy thing (at least initially), but "looking for a job" is a terrible experience. I can make blog posts about the decline of labor rights in America, depressed salaries, and tie in lots of bummers about housing, wealth inequality, politics, etc. but damn that stuff is depressing.

The strategy

I'm not sure about others, but looking at that stuff for too long doesn't motivate me. It does exactly the opposite. On the other hand, I'm happy to cheer for people doing their best despite what's against them. I'm not a hero, and the things I feel working against me (internally and externally) are not that interesting, unique or important. I'm not convinced that a blog full of "white dude gets the shaft (but not less than others)/has opinions on the state of things" makes for terribly interesting reading. Everyone is quite aware of how badly and from which angle they're getting fucked, and I can't really add anything meaningful to that conversation. Besides, Network, The Art of Demotivation, Evgeny Mozorov, and David Graeber have covered the ground sufficiently.

Additionally, non-disparagement agreements make it legally dicey for me to share anything in a non-abstracted form with any sufficient detail.

So I'm drawing a comic. I get to practice my drawing. I get to write characters that I want to root for and against. And I can set a fairly non-aggressive schedule of 1 per week.

What is it?

My drawing so far has been mostly sketches, pixel art, a few icons, and some web design. I've never really done a comic with recurring characters before, but this feels like something I'll enjoy and others will too.

Our protagonist is a Pika, which is about the most adorable animal ever. The antagonist is a Tibetan Sand Fox, which conveniently in nature, eats pikas and has a ridiculous looking face.

I started out by drawing a few pikas from pictures. Turned out ok. Cartoonifying them so that I can do it quickly, and being able to rotate them is my next consideration. I have plenty of 3-panel and 4-panel ideas, so it really comes down to the drawing.

How I'm learning to draw

I have worked with some videos and books before, but even if my goal was just cartooning, developing an intuition around form, color, and lighting is not something I've been able to do without a slightly more traditional approach.

Ctrl Paint has been a pretty great experience so far. Besides developing my drawing skills, it is very helpful for practicing with Photoshop. I wouldn't say that I've put myself dramatically closer to my goal, but I don't think it's something that's directly addressable.

I'm "good enough" to draw comics already, but I want them to be better than what I can do right now.

So anyways, here's what I've been learning lately (mostly from ctrl paint:

Takeaways

Drills are important. A few things you can do:

Ovals
Lines
Lines to point
Lines from point
Arc drawings (connecting 3 points)
Concentric Arcs
Pattern squares
Lighting studies
Material vs. form studies
Gesture drawings (contour)
Gesture drawings (hybrid)
A simple character doodle with variations
Thumbnail sketches
3 tone renderings (with white and toned paper)
X-minute sketches
Combining/mutating Thumbnails
Color guessing
Color mixing

Really important photoshop things (should know the keyboard shortcuts for these regardless of program):

Merging/Flattening layers
Rotating the canvas
New layers (temp layers)
Tool Presets
Brush/Erase workflow
New Layer/Merge layer workflow
Zooming/moving the canvas
Free Transform & accompanying options (esp. Warp)
Brush size/flow/opacity adjustment
Color picking
Masks
Path operations
Layer via cut
Rectangles and Ellipses

Tool Presets for brushes/erasers:

Charcoal
Kneaded eraser
Vinyl eraser
Pencil

A few big takeaways:

There are a million gradations between photorealism and sketching.
Being informed by, but not restricted to traditional materials is valuable.
It's not a photo. Any realism or emphasis otherwise is optional.
Levels of finish are optional. Being able to do them and knowing how long they take is important.
Different artists use different materials for different audiences at varying levels of finish.
Having a comfortable and dedicated space for drawing would be really nice.
Big smooth gestures are drawn from the shoulder, not the wrist.
There are two straight lines that are easy (for me) to draw. One is a deliberate, long stroke down. The other is a (roughly 30 degree angle upward) from left to right.

Smaller takeaways:

A dark part or a light part of a drawing might have more detail (too shiny/bright and the detail gets blown out).
Having multiple very saturated colors can make things look ugly.
I'd like to try charcoal, and 10%/50% markers sometime.

Anyways

I'm making a cartoon, but it's going to be a while.