Almost 5 days! Damn.
Welp, a heavy couple of days as usual. Ended up working 35 hours in IT this week, 35 in independent programming, about 10 on art... Yea, I feel pooped.
Still, did a bit of progress worth sharing.
Term 4 progress
Final piece, 5 out of 5. Color palettes exercice.
Going for a fanservicy catgirl. Akami Shin is her (temporal?) name. Spoiled and spunky princess of the hidden kingdom.
Did the sketch, some inking and settled on the basic tones, but still got a lot of work to do.
I'll probably adjust the eyes more, but the general idea is there.
More importantly, I'm slowly coming to understand color harmonies. This stuff really helps!!
Manga
One more page! Need to pick up the pace, still got a lot to do to wrap up this chapter.
Just a small pacing page, but I'm picking up some tips on quick shading and random backgrounds+composition.
On regards to the process of doing manga, I figured I would document as part of my art journey a few things. I'll probably try to add something about each page I make, but for now there was something that kinda shook my approach and really made me think on where to go moving forward.
Instead of trying to explain it, I'll leave the video here and add my thoughts about it under it. It's mostly about manga, but I believe it also applies to any creative comic/story artist.
As someone who is trying to tell a long story, this hit me right in the guts. Becuase deep down, I know it's true.
It's overall better to do one shots (or short stories) that to do long standing stories as a solo author.
It's hard to promote my work and ask people to read 25+ chapters, especially when the initial ones are of much lower quality. It's hard to iterate on ideas when I've comitted myself to do 20 pages (which is about a month of work) to do a small piece of the story.
I think it wouldn't be right of me to ignore the advice of 50+years of experienced mangakas under the premise of this just being a hobby of mine, becuase I DO want to improve and be better, and like any creator, it's is my hope to someday be able to publish my work more formally.
So where does that leave me? Do I leave this story I've been trying to flesh out and am so passionate about and try to do small one shots instead?
I agree with the concept that it's important as a beginner story teller and manga creator to do smaller self contained stories. I think this idea is REALLY important the more I think about it, it is especially evident after already producing 25 chapters of my manga. It's absolutely something I need to do.
It'll be easier to promote more recent works. It'll be easier for people to read and appreciate self contained chapters and to share them, they'll be better planned and executed instead of committing to a challenging production schedule, and iterating on ideas and short stories will certainly help me grow as a manga creator and story teller. This is definetly what I need to do.
So my plan moving forward is to wrap up the current arc I'm working on (probably 2 or 3 more chapters), and then focus on creating self contained, smaller short stories (each might be of varying amount of pages). However I plan to have these short stories take place in the world, story and with the characters I have already created and still want to develop.
Each small story can be self contained, readers can enjoy it individually, but I'll strcuture it in a way that it still continues the overarching story I'm already creating. Continuous readers will surely enjoy more the short stories with more context, but no one is required to go back and read previous chapters to understand the short story.
If you think about it, it's kind of what DC and Marvel do in that they tell small self contained stories usually lasting 4-5 issues, but still move forward a bigger story that end up culminating in a special issue. It's also kind of how Marvel movies where structured in their 10 Thanos saga. It makes sense.
That was long winded. Thanks for reading if you're still here, but either way it's an important junction in this art/manga creating journey and I figured it was worth putting on paper.
All that said, the grinding never stops! I still got so much more to do!
