Thread by @howardtayler

After literal *weeks* of staring at blank pages and musing non-productively about how best to proceed, I'm now laying out bonus story pages for the next Schlock Mercenary book, and everything appears to be working.

Part of the roadblock was that I can see how any given problem, especially a small one, will amplify itself during the process of grinding out multiple pages. Like the flatting thing, where I was getting uncolored jaggies despite using (I thought) settings to prevent those.

I know that tiny frustrations, especially things that will cost me a few minutes here and there, can add up to the point that the whole project becomes a miserable slog.

So rather than getting work done, I've been getting crap out of the way of the work.

VERY SLOWLY.

The most recent piece to fall into place? The Scrivener update. I didn't actually realize how seized-up the scripting process had become until I opened the project files in the new Scrivener and was very, VERY quickly able to bang out new pages of dialog and description.

There's a double-edged sword here, and it's one I warn people about all the time.

New writers and artists? DON'T DO THIS THING I'M DOING. Just muscle through the frustration, and make as much stuff (art, words, whatever) as you can.

Until you've written and/or drawn and/or otherwise created a lot of stuff, you're not in the right place to hold a project up while you noodle around, painstakingly refining all the processes by which you'll work on the project.

YMMV, obviously.

Some people step out of the gate so incredibly self-aware, so "procedurally woke," that they are perfectly justified in holding things up while they define and refine all the processes.

Some people.

SOME.

In my case, I made a daily comic strip for TWENTY YEARS using a process I defined, refined, and streamlined over the first decade or so.

But I'm not making comics that way anymore. I've introduced completely new tools at EVERY STAGE. And until very recently, they weren't right.

Old process:

Script in MS Word
Layout panels/gutters/dialog in MS Word
Pencil and ink directly on laser-printed MS Word output
Scan at 600dpi b/w
Send to colorist, with notes on what I'm expecting
Crop and webbify the colorist's work in Photoshop

It may seem like madness, but it was *fast*. There were days when I penciled and inked THREE WEEKS OF COMICS. In one day, yes. The process had flaws, especially w/re to dialog bubbles and the paper I was using, but it was too fast to let go of.

The new process:

Script in Scrivener
Layout panels and dialog in Clip Studio Paint.
Illustrate digitally, with raster colors and vector inks.
(↑ this step is still a mess of other steps ↑)
Export flattened TIFF
Use Photoshop for CMYK conversion for print

One of the things I realized very recently, is that even if I create a document with a given dimension in pixels (say, 1600x1200), the resolution (72dpi, 300dpi, etc) makes a HUGE difference with regard to all the brushes, because those are measured in millimeters.

When I drew Spiney, I had the document resolution set to 300dpi. Even my skinniest inking nibs were chonky. I was most of the way through before I realized it wasn't just that I was having a bad, ham-fisted day. The brushes were all more than 3x bigger than I was used to.

(Spiney: note the honk-a-chonk-badonka-donk lines EVERYWHERE)

(Compared to Tosa, drawn at 72dpi. Same pixel dimensions for the overall image, but my tools worked like I needed them to, with a mixture if fine lines and fat lines.)

Flashing back to my comment about "small frustrations."

Ironing out this thing about pixel density and brush size is CRITICAL, because few things will kill my workflow faster than an ongoing feeling that I'm just a hamfisted hack who can't correctly shape a simple line.

With the Schlock Mercenary bonus story stuff, I'm creating the full page spreads in Clip Studio Paint, and I've decided that it's safest, in order to prevent scaling errors, to work at actual page dimensions and actual pixel density: two 8.5"x11" pages, side-by-side, at 600dpi.

This means the brushes I've locked down for 72dpi work on TypecastRPG illos are (math math math) about eight times too fat for work on the Schlock Mercenary bonus stories.

A headache, perhaps, but I know how to do the (math math math) part to make the brushes Schlock needs.

There might be a "workspace" setting that will let me create a 72dpi tool set for TypeCastRPG, and a 600dpi set for Schlock. Ideally it'd be something I could engage with a hotkey or menu click.

And yeah, I might hold up production until I figure this bit out.

Circling waaay back around to that double-edged sword: the fastest way to arrive at the point where you're not just aware of your processes, but aware of where they're broken, and how to fix them, is to WRITE STUFF DOWN.

Time yourself on common tasks. Allow yourself to have periodic "contextual inquiry" sessions with yourself, where you pause after every task to scribble a note about how it went, and why you think it went that way.

When your industry, your creative domain, your niche space suddenly gets invaded by disruptive and wonderful new tools, you'll be one of the first to see how they'll fit what you're doing, and whether or not it's worth it for you to change to fit the new tool.

And maybe the disruptive new tool is as simple as a new studio space with room to roll your chair around. Maybe it's a larger table. Or a bigger hard drive.

I dunno. And neither will you unless you're paying a little bit of attention (like "dues) to how you make stuff.

EOT. I need to get back to making stuff. Oh, and we have TypeCastRPG tonight, just (math math math) four and a half hours from now, so I need to make sure I'm all prepped for that.