I can’t remember the exact year that Plump the Post happened. But I think it was no later than 2018.
Plump the Post was a zine collecting art made by and for fat representation. For my entry, I wanted to highlight chubby genderqueer people because they’re valid, too.
(Also Hollywood has a tendency that even IF they highlight trans characters, they’re, 99.9% of the time, skinny.)
The model who served as inspiration for this piece was a friend of a friend, a chubby trans dude whom I am not naming to protect his privacy.
The Woman of the Woods is a character I created for Rosetta and the Swan, my retelling of Swan Lake. (The version I’m working on is set around a fictional equivalent of the Baltic Sea. Also it’s the prince who is turned into a swan).
In my retelling of the story, the Woman of the Woods is one of many countless wise women who reside in The Woods. The Woods themselves are enormous and ancient. The people who live in Rosetta’s kingdom know of ONE Woman of the Woods – the one pictured above. She is hardly ever seen in her human form. Usually she is only spotted as a bear.
However, this particular Woman of the Woods has close ties to the royal family. And it’s she who blesses Rosetta with the ability to talk to animals.
All of this is to say…she’s available as a hi-resolution download. Check it out either on Patreon or Ko-Fi (she’s available for download on both platforms).
Here’s part of page 9 of my webcomic The Legend of Jamie Roberts.
Ever since I switched from PhotoShop to Clip Studio Paint, I have LOVED how much easier Clip Studio Paint is to use.
That said, on occasion it can be a bit of a headache. One specific way it can bother me is when I’m adding shading to a comic page.
See, I cheat a lot – I’ll trace a shape over where I want my shadows to be, and then I use my Bucket tool to fill in the blanks. When I do this I often have the bucket tool set to “Refer to other layers.”
Why? Because my line work is on a separate layer from my shades. I don’t do all of my art on the same layer, you fiend.
That said, sometimes CSP will have a brain-fart, especially if the shade color is very close to a color I’m painting over. So instead of only filling in where I want, sometimes CSP will be like, “color THE WHOLE THING? OK!”
But I figured out a way around this. And it’s made producing comics WAY easier.
The secret?
Well, I need to show how I do a comic page first.
I have the following layers to work with: the base drawing. The Edits (where I clean up lines and smudges). Colors. Shades. Letters.
The secret is: I turn the Color Layer off.
It’s super easy: just click the little eyeball on that layer and boom – it turns off.
This has made shading A LOT easier. My Bucket tool no longer tries to fill in a space that’s the same/similar color to the shade color.
Also – it has made looking at what I’m shading WAY easier.
I tend to include a lot of dark colors in my pages. That makes shading a thing pretty tricky to the naked eye. So turning the Color layer off has made it far easier to judge how far shadows need to go.
Another plus is if I wanted to make a black and white version of a color comic, this cheat makes it easy.
This year’s 3 Rivers Comicon was a mixed bag. But to explain why, I need to split this into 3 parts.
PART 1: THE BEHIND-THE-SCENES DRAMA
Full disclosure: right now, when I’m not making comics, I work part-time at my local comic shop. It so happens that my local comic shop is a branch of New Dimension Comics, the same company that runs 3 Rivers Comicon. Because of that, I could talk for like an hour about some behind-the-scenes stuff regarding how gaming tables were pilfered at the last minute for use at the convention, but I’m not going to get into that.
I could also tell a funny anecdote about a behind-the-scenes debate concerning what food to provide convention guests (pb & j sandwiches or pizza??), but I’m not going to get into that either.
