Amanda "Holydust" Martin

;_; I seriously just spent my fourth all-nighter in a row trying to figure out how I managed to already wreck a week-old fresh Windows 7 install. I swear to God, I’m a virtual klutz.

I have had a slow streak lately, but the past week and a half have been plagued by consistent problems arising from my apparent inability to properly install drivers. Combine that with my desperate bid for organization and you have a clumsy girl who’s so busy being productive that she never gets anything done (and also tends to break the shit she’s already fixed).

After day 4 I seem to have things under control again. With any luck, after I wake up it’ll finally be time to put a dent in my commission docket again. I hope so; I’m tired of staring at dismal reliability reports and spammy event viewer errors.

On the plus side, I ditched expensive facial cleansers in favor of a warm washcloth and a dab of baking soda, and my skin finally, finally looks amazing (three days later). If only I’d figured this out half a grand ago. I guess that’s what happens when you never have a grandma around. (Nobody’s fault, just the facts! Don’t take your grandma for granted.)

I settled down to work last night intending to hack out two more commission sketches, but wound up pausing to try a quick exercise in perspective which turned into a three-and-a-half-hour practice session before I knew it. I actually jumped into two-point first, then wound up trying some one-point when I got stuck trying to figure out how to measure the scale of the left-to-right diagonal lines in feet.

It’s actually a lot more fun once you get the hang of it, which is why I wound up whiling away the hours messing around with it. My foray into one-point was a lot less impressive-looking, but gave me an opportunity to get back to practicing placing objects in a room in a way that makes sense without having to reference photos. I came to the realization that I need to be able to do this while working on a commission for Ichigo-Neko; I had attempted to place a lamp in the foreground, only to realize that whatever it would be sitting on would be well out of the bounds of the image and I didn’t have the first clue how to measure where to put it, much less how big it should be.

Sai and Photoshop both aren’t very friendly with that sort of thing.  You can’t have vanishing points off the bounds of the image because you won’t see them. It’s just two dots, but you have to know where they are because you’re constantly dragging lines from them to the points on the shapes in your image. You pretty much have to draw out the whole floorplan in perspective much larger than you’ll need it (a view that would make your characters very small) and then crop down to the essentials. Time-consuming, but I think the result will be worth it.

Again, the one-point practice turned out pretty fugly — but I didn’t want to try to kick off the rust with perspective that was too difficult. I realized that if I want to have any kind of stability in settings, I need to have two vanishing points that appear WAY off the bounds of the focus of the image, which means starting very small and then cropping it only once I don’t need the VPs anymore.

I actually wound up giving up when I tried to place a box on the dresser that was rotated at an awkward angle; I couldn’t figure out the method myself and the two books I have on perspective don’t explain it very well. After I’d given up, I found this tutorial and realized I’d seen it before, but hadn’t remembered that it explains it very simply. Next time I’ll know how!

Anyway, I have four hours to make up for later on, but I think I can hack it.

This isn’t a centerpiece—it’s how I keep focused in order to work each day. Freelancing—which sounds so glamorous, even if it’s just a fancy way of saying you’re unemployed but get paid a bit to enjoy a hobby—is fraught with its own little dangers. No insurance, a need to get more exercise since you’re not walking around a big office, no real set sleep/wake schedule, no boss to make sure you get your work done. Your boss is guilt, and there are times I’ve preferred a real, live human yelling at me to the voice in my head telling me to stop sucking and get moving on my backlog when the muse is playing mute.

With that in mind, and knowing that I’m the hardest type of person to motivate, I’ve experimented with a lot of productivity systems.

In the past, I tried keeping a dry-erase board, which had its perks. I could see the date at a glance, which is awesome when you’re a freelancer who sleeps weird hours and often has no idea whether it’s Tuesday or Saturday. But it had its cons, too—inaccessible from my desk, I’d get tired of having to leap up and adjust it thirty times a day, so it quickly fell by the wayside.

After that, I tried keeping calendars online and using planner software—Google Calendar is still great, but for tasks, it didn’t have the tangible, attractive appeal I really needed, and it was too easily forgotten. To date, I haven’t found a software planner that can hold my attention, because I need it to be pretty. Thankfully, the iPad has a better selection and I’m pretty close to finding one. Moving on…

GTD
Fed up, I tried “Getting Things Done (GTD)“, which now strikes me as a revolutionary idea for businessmen and people with underlings (there’s actually a focus on delegating tasks to other people if you don’t want to do them!), but it’s almost worthless to a freelance artist. GTD, for someone like me, is like having a brand new gaming computer when all I want to do is use the Calculator. It’s also more of a task-planning and organization system, which is great, but I’ve come away from it with my own system of recordkeeping and task management. So, though I’m more organzed, I can’t say I “use” GTD with any real honesty.

That said, thanks to GTD I’ve been using Evernote to keep track of absolutely everything from commission notes to personal shopping lists, writing exercises, and even notes about the MMORPG I play. Since it synchs to every device I own, it’s been a huge lifesaver. I don’t need to dig through FA notes or e-mails for information anymore, since the moment I get something new and important, it goes into a note for each client I’m working with. But I’ll make another post about that, later.

Pomodoro
Still without a concrete plan, I tried the Pomodoro technique (25 minutes of work and 5 minute breaks, progressing in length for each as the day goes on), which is amazing for college studies, but requires a certain adherence to the rules and philosophy that didn’t work for me. 25 minutes was a little too long, and avoiding distractions during that time was too difficult, even with practice. Not only that, but the Pomodoro system requires that you note not only interruptions in your workflow, but even when you have the URGE to interrupt your workflow, or if you think of something you need to do later. And the marks you keep on your log sheet are hard to memorize and understand, sometimes.

It became more complex than I anticipated, and that kind of obsessive tallying was every bit as big an interruption to me as stopping my work. Worse still: as part of the training to keep you on task and avoid interuptions, you have to “cancel out” the block if you let yourself stop. And that’s just not a good system when you’re working on a piece of art that could take 8 hours… having to cancel out 15 minutes of work because your dog is choking on part of a shoe isn’t great for morale. So I moved on.

(10+2)*5
Then came (10+2)*5, which turned out to be too mercurial and lively for even a flighty person like me to handle. (And I have ADD.) The idea is to bang out five ten-minute blocks with two-minute breaks in between, and it’s for the worst procrastinators who can’t stand working for longer than ten minutes at a time. But ten minutes is actually too short for a work block, for me, and the two-minute break is hardly long enough to get a soda or go to the bathroom. But (10+2)*5 got me so much closer to a system that I felt I could use, so I sat down to ponder what I could do to make me enjoy it:

• I needed longer than 10 minutes, but less than 25.
• I needed a way to keep track of time for both breaks and work blocks that wouldn’t have me constantly adjusting a physical dial, pulling up a program on my computer to type, or uncapping a pen to jot a tally mark on a Post-It note.
• I needed to be allowed to skip breaks if I wanted to.
• I needed a system that would divide evenly enough into an hour so that I could easily tell how many blocks would fill the hour.

When the timer rings, take a token and drop it in the bowl. Take your break or start another round. You can keep an eye on the number of tokens in the bowl if you like, but the object of this system is to just keep working in short bursts. You’ll be surprised at how much time goes by when you aren’t actually keeping track with hard numbers.

When you can’t work any more or you’ve reached your goal time, make a note of how long you worked. Feel free to work “overtime” and store it up for another day when you need a break. If you grab an hour here and a half-hour there, you’ll have an entire “day off” to take, totally guilt-free, in no time at all.

If you want to work your full time and not a moment more, only keep handy the number of tokens you need to total that amount of time. You’ll know you’re done when you grab the last token. I don’t recommend this, as I like being pleasantly surprised when I get tired, count up my tokens and find out I earned myself an hour’s head-start on tomorrow.

My husband often comes into my office to talk to me, and since I play FFXI sometimes when I’m taking my breaks or when I’m done, I would worry it looked like I’d been goofing off for who-knows-how-long. Now, the bowl is right there on my desk with a visible measure of how many hours I’ve worked that day. It’s priceless.

I’ve used this system for about six days now, and not only have I been meeting my goals (which seemed lofty at the time I devised this plan), I’ve been going over them every single day that I work. You guys know how easily distracted I am. You guys know how easy it is for me to get discouraged and bummed out when I’ve been drawing for seven hours straight—do something you love enough and it turns into work. But with this system, eight hours has turned into ten or eleven over the course of a day.

Yes, I’m someone who is home all the time and I don’t have much of a social life; you don’t have to push yourself as hard as I have. Start small and work up to your ultimate daily goal, if necessary. But if you want to make sure you’re getting things done, don’t want the pressure and wasted time of dilligently keeping track, and need a system that looks pretty and helps you stay on task, hopefully this strange technique will work for you, too.

In December of 2010, I decided I’d try to do a free sketch a month for folks who submitted Testimonials for my blog. I planned to do a random drawing each month of the people in the list and give them a single-character sketch if they won. Seemed easy enough, but unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find the time.

I apologize profusely to Kace, Anzel, and Sibirski (still MIA), who won before I folded on the raffle for those few months — I WILL continue the program, and I will get those people their sketches and re-draw for all the months that have been missed, but for now, the program is on hold.  I haven’t had time to work on my comic in a couple of months and bills are kind of stacking up, but with the way I’ve improved in the past month since I started taking the ADD medication, my hopes are pretty high that I can get the program back on track ASAP.

I also want to give a shout-out to Connor.Drake, who I still owe a piece of gift art for his part in helping me out during the Scrambles-is-missing debacle. I haven’t forgotten you, and now that things are finally easing up I should be able to get that pic you wanted finished.

Thanks to everyone for your support. It means so much to me!

Inks overlaid with sketch and shadow mockup, Paint Tool Sai. Commission for LadyLoki.

I would honestly work more on this, but I have been bent over this tablet for 7 hours now, and while 7 hours is a short work day for some folks, until I figure out a way to make this setup more ergonomic I’m probably risking serious problems later in life. X3 So I’m gonna go chill before bed.

I would have just posted this to FA, but they’re down at the moment. So, ’til then, enjoy the latest piece, commissioned by Shubert.

My first time drawing a pokemanz and required my doing actual research on how pokéballs worked so that I could figure out how a pokéball belt would actually look. :)

This piece took 10 hours total. Ink and color in Sai, post work in Photoshop.

…that Tepig is actually a damn cute Pokémon.

Working on Shubert’s piece. I’ve put in 9 freakin’ hours on this one and I think I’m about ready to call it a night. :D I won’t actually be airbrushing the picture — I was just messing around with color themes. But when I get tired sometimes I just keep doing whatever dumb thing I’m doing even if I know I’m gonna trash it later. Anyway — cute! Cuteness! And my first Pokémon I ever arted. Hurrdurr.

Made some serious headway last night! Actually really loving the dark, dull greys. Will probably post a b&w version when it’s done since it’s gone over so well. My last few pieces seem to have come a lot easier since my break. It creeps me out, but I swear I get a lot better when I just walk away for a while. They say that your practiced behaviors have new chances to sink in when you go to sleep, but you can also get rusty. I think, in my particular case, even if I walk away from art for a month, I absorb things from fashion ads, television, commercials, and comic books. So, when I come back, I feel like whatever I turn out is always still much better than whatever I might have turned out after the last piece if I had done it right away.

That isn’t to say I can’t get worse once in a while! I totally can. I just usually find that my first piece after a break usually comes a little easier. So, I guess I’m advocating for breaks now and then if you get stuck. Sometimes it can give your inspiration some time to refresh itself!

Working on Ichigo’s piece today. As with Koyote’s piece (NSFW), which I just wrapped up yesterday, I’m going to attempt to just paint the hair, ears, tail, and rug, and only ink the rest. This obviously only works if the lines are reduced in opacity and tinted to the appropriate colors, but I’ve been taking a shortcut on that. It won’t work for everyone, unfortunately, but it can still be done — just requires more time and effort.

You can see the results in Koyote’s commission linked above. I do the following:

1. Shade and color the entire image (I usually shade in variations of dark grey to light grey, using white for “hot” highlights only, then using gradient maps in Photoshop to add color). When it’s time for cast shadows and rim lights, I add them afterwards, sometimes with a blending mode to make the shades beneath show through.
2. Hide all line layers (and anything in the background if it hasn’t been painted, as in a simple character portrait), then Select All -> Copy Merged. This will copy only the character and/or props, minus the lines, and leaves the rest transparent. If there’s a regular background that you want to tint other lines with, skip Step 4.
3. Paste the copied image on top of the line layer.
4. (If there’s a regular background that you want to tint other lines with, skip this step because it’s unnecessary.) I then use Flaming Pear’s “Solidify” filter on the merged copy, more specifically “Solidify C”. It fills in all the transparent areas with areas of color nearest the edges. (You can get it here — it’s one of their freebies! Scroll down to “free plugins”.)
5. I blur that layer a little and then set it as a “clipping layer” over the lineart, with “normal” as the blending mode.
6. I drop the opacity of this layer until the lines are of a suitable darkness — sometimes I go for just barely colored, other times I keep the opacity high so that it almost looks totally painted.
7. Do any touching up manually. Sometimes you’ll have weird little blocks of color you don’t want — it comes from painting underneath lines, particularly with thicker ones. With fair-skinned or -furred characters, the area around the eyes will often come out with lines that are too light if you were relying on your inks for lash lines and such, so you’ll want to darken them by hand or add layers underneath to paint in the darker bits.