Trust in the drawing

The script required this page have a drawing of a 'Barsoom' city. I had to look up the what Barsoom meant. I watched John Carter Warlord of Mars 2012 which is a good yarn, but was not visually inspired. My first sketches being a bit vague and not epic enough.

I asked Microsoft CoPilot Ai for help. This is something I have done a few times working on this episode and I need to talk about it in another post. It's a good way of generating angles and perspectives for scenes that stump me artistically. I used 'Martian type Barsoom city as viewed from the canals' as my prompt. I was not willing to spend much more time than that on it, as I am not after using the generated image, just the layout. Back in the day I would have flipped through old books and magazines for ideas.

You can see the influence of the Ai design in my layout sketch, it's not a direct copy but there's enough information to get over my aphantasia addled brain. I was using a fine UniPin brush pen  for speed.

I used Layout Paper, the idea being I could ink direct using my light pad onto A4 cartridge paper saving me a lot of time. Of course that didn't work out as intended and I ended up pencilling it onto paper anyway.

It was here that I had a real struggle. I recorded a six minute rant and asked my phone to transcribe it to text, and then asked the Ai to rewrite it into a blog post for me, hoping to make some sense of what was going on inside my head. Here' the Google Gemini Ai transcript...

Pencil Vs ink line layouts! (recorder transcript as interpreted by Ai)

"I've always been drawn to the spontaneous creative process, but it wasn't until I started making comic strips that I truly discovered my passion for drawing. Initially, I was frustrated by the repetitive nature of my work. I found myself constantly redrawing panels, chasing after a sense of spontaneity and freshness that seemed elusive in my comics work.

At the start of this year I did something counter intuitive and developed a meticulous approach to drawing comics. I began by carefully penciling everything on the page, using pencil lines as a guide for the inking process. This method worked wonders for several months, helping me achieve a level of quality to the finished page I was satisfied with.

However, the wind and weather changed. My mental state declined and the resulting break from drawing threw me off balance. When I returned, I felt like an amateur again, unsure of my abilities and hesitant to start. Inspiration struck when I stumbled upon a YouTube video of the comics artist Jay Lee, who used striking, in both senses, brush lines to create his lines and ink his pencil work. I was immediately drawn to his style and began experimenting with a fine line brush pen to do layouts.

The results were fantastic. I loved the layouts I created and even considered switching to inking with the brush pen permanently. But as I continued working, I realised that I was inadvertently introducing the very elements I had been trying to avoid. The process of tracing over the layouts with a dip pen nib and lightbox felt mechanical and repetitive. It is a different process using translucent sheets and the lightbox to opaque lines on white paper.

Frustration set in once again as I found myself redrawing panels multiple times. The familiar cycle of disappointment and self-doubt began to take its toll. I decided to return to my original method of penciling and inking directly on the page.

Through this experience, I learned a valuable lesson: sometimes, the most straightforward approach is the most effective. While shortcuts and tools can be tempting, they don't always save time or improve the quality of the finished work. By embracing the traditional process of penciling and inking, I was able to enjoy the drawing and create work that I'm truly proud of."

Frustrating. I redrew the top two panels four times trying to get them right resulting in patches over the original panels. So the moral of this post is: Stick to what works, trust in the drawing and don't get tempted by a quick fix.