The Hermitage School of Art (yes, “Hermitage“, not “Heritage“) is run out of a woman’s home. It’s a very nice home, with three large upstairs rooms running three different classes simultaneously. Victoria, the headmistress/schoolmarm/whatever employs maybe half a dozen assistants, most of whom manage the beginners’ classes. Victoria and one or two of her more senior assistants rove all the classrooms, offering advice of all kinds — “watch the negative space here,” “grab white for this highlight,” etc.

Most of a student’s time is spent working on a piece, and the instruction, such as it is, is very practical in nature. The school limits itself to teaching the realistic reproduction of reference photos with pastels, acrylics, or watercolors, and the walls are adorned with some pretty impressive pieces by Victoria and some of her advanced pupils. The use of reference pictures allows the instructors to “see” what the students are seeing, and enables them to accurately advise on how to achieve a particular effect.

Ultimately, I’m there to tweak my mad c0lor1ng sk1llz. Intellectually, I know that a human face seen illuminated from one side positively BOILS with colors — reds, whites, purples, blues, reflected colors from the background, and so forth. Practically, when I sit down to color my Schlock, I seldom take the trouble to do more than pick a single fundamental color and flood-fill. Lately I’ve been doing deeper shading on Sundays (I’m pleased with the last two Sunday comics, here and here) but even then I’m timid with the color range. Rarely do I stray out more than “halfway” up or down Photoshop’s color bar for a given fundamental shade, and I never nudge the colors sideways, introducing other shades from reflected light.

I’m not saying I WILL do this once I’ve learned how. I’m just saying I want to learn to be able to, so that the crap you see in the comic is crappy because I CHOSE for it to be crappy, rather than because I can’t do any better.

The comic isn’t called “Schlock Mercenary” for nothing, folks.

–Howard

Art Class was fun today. I took a photo of Sandra, gridded it, and then put a matching grid on some art board. Then I sketched into the big grid, using the small one as a reference.

It’s basic stuff. I’ve done it before. Mostly this was the “busy-work” part of my schooling, because what I’m really interested in learning is how to color things. Next week I’ll take pastels to the board, and color it to look like Sandra.

I sat next to Kiki in class, in the room with four or five 10-year-old art students. I don’t have a problem with that — most of the adults were in the other room, but by sitting next to my daughter I get to sponge off her supplies. No way can we afford to buy me a brick of pastels and pastel pencils, no sir. Anyway, I spent the first 40 minutes of the hour prepping: scaring up materials, drawing the grid on transparency over the original photo, scaling the grid up onto the board, checking the landmark points… all the fundamental stuff that you need to do when you’re working from a reference picture. Oh, and I took five minutes out to do a quick cartooning demonstration for the kids (at the headmistress’ request, no less) — it was the “Kaff Tagon, Karl Tagon, Captain Kerchak” demo I did at Fandemonium and Linucon.

Well, with 20 minutes left in class, I was FINALLY ready to start DRAWING. It was fun, because I can go FAST. All those precise grid-measurements, the straight-edging, all that tedium, it all existed to make the DRAWING part go faster and better, and it worked. Just 15 minutes later I had a sketch that was ready for pastels. This impressed the room full of ten-year-olds, which was a disturbingly effective boost for my fragile ego. Granted, it also impressed the instructor, but she didn’t use those fifth-grade exclamations and go all wide-eyed. She just said “wow, that was quick.”

So next week I get to actually play with colors. It’s been 20 years since I used opaque colors, and the process is going to feel backwards. I’m told you start with your darkest shades, and then build lighter and lighter. With markers, which are translucent colors, and with which I’m much more familiar, you start with your lightest shades, and color down into the dark areas last. And both of those are nothing like Photoshop, which is my friend.

“Man, the Undo Buffer on these pastels SUCKS. Is there any way for me to revert to my last save?”

–Howard

Today has been rough. When I awoke there were two tasks in front of me: color everything I drew yesterday, and script everything I need to draw tomorrow.

Consider, I COULD have gotten up and started coloring immediately. It has to be done to build the uploaded buffer, but it’s work I’m comfortable doing a day or two before the strips need to air (though I SHOULDN’T be comfortable this way — computer problems or FTP woes could easily knock me into “no update yet” country).

Scripting, on the other hand, gets done when I feel like scripting. It’s often the bottleneck, because a thick stack of scripts means that when my hand is up to it, I can draw until the cows come home. In January of 2004 I pencilled two weeks’ worth in one sitting. That was the time the buffer went from 4 in December to 40 in late January.

So I decided to script. There were three possible avenues I could take, and I spent three hours not writing anything while I worried over which would work best. I had breakfast, I napped a bit (sometimes napping shakes ideas loose. No, really.) and I paced around the house.

It was noon before I sat down to actually WRITE.

The good news is that it’s now 1:20pm, and I have another week’s worth of scripts. I’m going to be able to incorporate a script I pencilled 2 weeks ago, but that broke the flow of the story, and THAT means I only have EIGHT rows to pencil instead of NINE. Oh, and the Sunday script is a two-row Sunday instead of the usual three rows (when the story goes forward and the punchline arrives in two rows, which is unusual, I do a two-row Sunday. It’s NOT because I’m lazy. Really), which means only SEVEN rows need pencilling.

BUT… I haven’t colored anything yet. This evening I have an art class with my daughter, so I’m losing some productive time. *sigh*.

Maybe I can get everything colored before then.

–Howard

p.s. Thanks for all the kind words in response to demiurgent‘s reply to my last Journal Entry. Though I’m not soliciting praise when I talk about the buffer, I certainly don’t mind HEARING it. This is hard work that I take lots of pride in, and I’m glad that folks not only love the story I’m telling, but appreciate the effort that goes into producing it with no interruptions.

Last week I sacrificed Schlock buffer to finish a commercial project, and succeeded in putting that project to bed. This week began with a bit of anxiety on Sunday when I realized that I was going to wake up Monday morning with only four scripts to work on, and with only five strips in the buffer.

The anxiety led to a late night, during which I scripted a bunch of crap I couldn’t use.

Monday morning I was determined to at least pencil and ink the Sunday that I knew worked (yes, that’s THIS COMING SUNDAY), and then dig in on scripting. I hoped to be able to script, pencil, and ink an entire week, but by 9am I hadn’t even started.

Well, here it is, 6:35pm, and I’ve succeeded. The buffer has more than doubled in size, because I cranked out seven strips. They’re good ones, too. Especially the one with the elf in it.

Anyway, the fight is NOT over. The buffer stands at 12 inked, 5 colored, which means I need to color seven, and then script, pencil, ink, and color ANOTHER seven this week. In fact, I hope to be able to do another FOURTEEN this week, because next week ends early with the start of LTUE 2005, and the week after that sees the beginning of another commercial project which is going to require MASSIVE amounts of time in a very short window.

So, here’s to continued cranking. I’m off to see about some fresh scripts.

–Howard