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dashawfrostart · 3 months

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This Week In "Time & Again" #11: Still Colouring, And Some Distractions

So... I have a few internet-posting goals for the close future. I know that I keep saying that all the time, but - since I'm an interwebs hermit, and I've been this way for, like, at least 10 years of my life now (and I have zero regrets 😁) - going online to post something takes an enormous mental effort from me. This is probably what happens when ageing, too. Every time I think about that, I just feel like those dogs from the funny videos who are being scolded for doing something their two-legged companions do not appreciate. So, basically and in a nutshell, this is my face when I think about going online to post stuff:

(source: https://makeagif.com/i/UyVZCW) And after all... why would I distract myself from work anyway? 😁 However, I really want more people to get acquainted with Lothar and Jeanny, and Edgar, and Winston, and Beatnik (oops, giant spoilers), and Daniel (oops, even more spoilers), and all of those other weirdos that our violent lovers meet on their strange path towards happiness (hopefully, because, truly, sometimes it's very difficult to say). So this is something that must be done eventually, so I will persevere😁💪 Rolling up my sleeves already!

Anyways, we know that Valentine's Day is coming! And I already have an artwork prepared to be uploaded very soon. Since in December last year I skipped a Christmas and New Years artwork, breaking my own good tradition and ever so slightly ruining a nice progression in the completion of my "2023 Pre-Christmas To-Do List", I figured I really should not delay with this one. And after all, everybody likes a little bit of spicy to set the mood for the upcoming Valentine's Day 😉 (and most of my Valentine's Day artworks are usually nothing short of "spicy" 😁 well, because they have to be that way).

I also made a totally random artwork, because I wanted to practice drawing certain something, a design element I would love to incorporate into my art style - so I came up with an idea to draw a parody of sorts. And it makes me really happy. It felt... rather refreshing. It gave me extra energy and happiness that I could use to continue working on the colouring for the actual chapter. Working so hard on the chapters of "Time & Again", I almost forgot how it feels to draw something random. Or something out of canon. Something simply for the fun of it. Many years ago most of my artworks used to be random and they were dedicated to random, various things and sometimes people. It was good. Now, since "Time & Again" to me is no less that a self-invented job (yeah, pretty much, for better or worse), I almost never do random funny and cute arts anymore, nevermind my greeting cards store had no updates from last year whatsoever... "Time & Again" might sound like a sort of obsession - but that is merely because I really, really, REALLY want to finish it up as soon as I can, because everyone should know what happened to Lothar and Jeanny and how they manage. Even if the confusion about the timelines still persists - but it's twice as fun this way! 😁

A fun observation: there's something in Lothar that I absolutely hate colouring! And the thing is absolutely essential to that particular dirtymouth individual! And the thing is... His glasses. Don't get me wrong! I love his glasses, the way they match his appearance, and that tiny bit of extra sexiness he magically acquires when wearing them. But dear goodness gracious, boy do I ever hate colouring them! 😤 It usually takes me at least 3 layers (lineart inclusive) to colour them, and then I have to arrange all the layers in the proper order. If the rest of the colours - including the skin and the clothing, but excluding special shiny/textured surfaces, if present - take me only one - ONE! - puny layer to make everything as it should be, then the glasses alone - that effing pathetic piece of... accessory! - take at least 2 layers of colouring. 3 with extra shine. Duuuuh. And they appear on every each panel with Lothar, because he wears them all the time. Geez, man! I hope sometime in the future that hot yet disgusting guy gets himself a pair of smart contacts with the built-in voice activated UI overlays. I'm sure he's rich enough to afford such a gimmicky thing. That will free me from a lot of extra work!.. (imagining things? entertaining my designer's hunger? foreshadowing? who knows?!?!;)))

... Which lead me to another one thought about the simplification of the colouring process. You see, with the colouring the way I do it, there's a lot of "automatic" work that is not really creative, one might say. I just need to fill the certain areas of the lineart with a certain colour and remove all the unfilled pixels afterwards... which is just a process of clicking, selecting areas and colours, and filling those areas with the right colours. And it's... kinda tedious. And monotonous. To be 100% fair, it's getting old fairly quickly. Now, shading and adding lighting effects is totally different. But filling the areas with the plain, flat colour prior to applying the shading... is incredibly "mechanical" to me. And my idea was... an AI program to do that. YES, YES, I KNOOOOW YOU'RE EITHER TURNING YOUR BACK ON ME NOW OR DOING THE ROBERT DOWNEY JR. MEME FACE after hearing (reading?) what I just said. I know the whole world just split into 2 groups of people who say either "AI yay!" or "AI nay!". Because, well, you see, human beings really enjoy disagreeing with each other, so there always has to be a reason (says I, cynically). My experience with AI is fairly limited as of now, but as a computer nerd - and a wife of yet another one computer nerd, for the full picture - the new technology mesmerizes me. I was shocked when ChatGPT named me the game I had trouble remembering the title of simply by my extremely vague (and partially wrong!) description - and it did it right off the bat, from the first try. I was utterly mind-blown. We've already heard a lot about AIs ruining the artists' works and yada yada, and we're not gonna touch this topic right now. But since AIs are capable of manipulation with the visual material, then why not teach it to automate the rather tedious processes in creating art while still keeping the essential "human" involvement intact? I would definitely use some nice program to automate the "select and fill, rinse and repeat" part of my work on Chapter 5 and potentially all the future chapters. An algorithm that would recognize the characters by their facial/bodily features and automatically colour them according to the colour scheme I created earlier (so, no random green hair if the character is blond, and no brown eyes if the eye colour must be blue, for example). Or something along the lines of that. Dammit, that would really make the work of the human artists so much faster whenever needed! I vote for this! I will hope from now on that somebody makes me a Krita extension with such a functionality now 😁

Deary me! I can't believe this actually happened! Sorta!.. I think this might be potentially the shortest blog post that I've written IN YEARS!.. Wowza! Apparently I can do that when I'm not trying, haha (but isn't it always this way?..😑 come to think of it, shopping works this way, too: when you're looking for something specific, you can never find it anywhere around!)

Sorry, no gifs today (aside from the funny dog one above). Moreover, when I looked into my screenshots folder, I have discovered that I did not take any this time while I've been working on the colouring like mad. This is sad, perhaps... So let me fix this! Here's a random screenshot that is very difficult to unsee, and it makes me super, super happy - especially considering what's actually happening in the story while Lothar is so... high? (would that be the right word in this situation? 🤔 man, sharing screenshots of random panels from the comic out of context is fairly odd)

... And now, I disappear into my little and comfy tree hollow, ruffling my feathers, so that I could work more on Chapter 5. Gotta make it stellar, after all! So I need more time in my tree hollow! Silky smooth! (ok, I start to get carried away associatively, so I better stop. Bye! See you soon in the next update!.. ah daaaaw, the next blog post! 👋)

#TimeAndAgainbyDWF #This Week In Time And Again #graphic novel

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