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Hey all,

I’ve touched on this topic a bit before in inspiration, but thought I’d go a bit more in depth.

I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember, but looking back at my old sketchbooks, I didn’t start drawing characters that looked anything remotely like me (fat or black) until I was half way through high school. It got me thinking back to what caused the change. I realized the big shift happened after reading Sophie Campbell’s the Abandoned zombie horror comic. I picked it up after being surprised by the cover in the manga aisle of a Books-A-Million. The cover had a chubby black chick with a red mohawk, piercings, and a black eye. I was pretty floored and spent my food money to buy it (Worth it!). That comic changed my creative life and made me thirsty for my content like it.

I read and reread it multiple times and afterwards I tried to find anything else that she had done. I lucked out on her Deviant Art page where she had galleries full of character and creature designs with info on other comics she made!

Sophie’s art truly opened my mind to new possibilities on the types of characters I could create. I had never seen such a diverse cast of women being the leads of stories that were 100% up my aisle (Fiction, Fantasy, Horror & Sci-fi baby). She drew everyone so diversely from one another it kinda blew my mind. Tall, short, trans, skinny, fat, buck teeth, sunken eyes, disabled bodies, muscular, different races, and sexual orientations all represented and everything felt natural and just right. I was mad thirsty for more, but unfortunately there really wasn’t anything else like her at the time in my fields of interest that I could find.

After being down about not finding anyone else doing what Sophie was doing, I started to look to my own work. Yeah I know right! The power was in my hands all along, but Imma be real… the thought never occurred to me. I learned to draw from copying various cartoons and anime that I saw on tv (mainly dbz). If it didn’t exist in those shows, I didn’t have a frame of reference for it. After viewing my old sketchbooks I found I had 2 body types. Muscular and skinny bones lol. Then I took a look in the mirror and started drawing myself. Then I looked to my family and friends. Before I knew it, I was drawing all kinds of characters and started world building on my comic MagicalMashup!

It’s wild that I can pinpoint the exact catalyst that prompted the change to what I create now, but it was such a big eye opener that proved to me how important representation was for my developing creativity. If I hadn’t found Sophie’s work, I probably would have developed quite differently as an artist and that’s cray to think about. It makes me wonder about others and if there are those with similar stories, or not?

TLDR: Through creating stories featuring women of all shapes, colors, and walks of life, Sophie Campbell’s work helped me see that It was ok to create characters that looked like me and those around me (who most definitely don’t look like the average comic characters). This solidified to me that representation matters. Did you have a catalyst that got you thinking about what you were creating and why? In what ways has it impacted what you make now?

Diversity is the spice of life and I love spice!- Lady T.

Like woah! It’s here and just wow. What is time even!? I’ve been networking, posting and promoting so much over the last few months leasing you to this point and woah here we are. I just want to get back to creating though bc that stuff is exhausting when paired with trying to make posting schedule across multiple sites. I know I’ll get ahold of it soon, but it’s way more time consuming than you’d think haha.

I’m thankful for my friends and fam for encouraging me to get to this point and I know I’m just starting in my comic making journey, so look forward for what’s to come!

Check my comic out y’all if you like my work ;)!

https://tapas.io/series/MagicalMashup

I also have some support pages too, so if you wanna help a gal out http://patreon.com/Lady_T_Musings and or https://ko-fi.com/ladytmusings/gallery

So now that I have a release date for the comic, it feel like time is just flying by. Like Nov 1st is right around the corner and though there is still tons to do, it’s important to breathe.

Not only am I trying to complete my backlog, I’m also working on promo illustrations and formatting all my main social media sites to reflect that I want to drive attention to my comic. I’m very much planning my wedding (and loving it) and looking to boost my income (without doing a second job). I wish overtime was a thing at my current job, but oh well. Gotta work with whY I got. So that means taking on some. Commissions. Do I have time for them? Haha no, but I’ve found that min maxing my time by planing accordingly will make the time.

I still have to be careful and only do a bit at a time, but I feel like working under these constraints (though they add pressure) help provide structured use of my time. I love gaming, but when I could be working on the comic, making a little side change, improving my skills, or working on the wedding, it really puts the way I use my time into perspective.

Now it’s important to enjoy your you time for sure, but structuring it so that it balances with self enrichment and productivity is where it’s at.

Here’s to progress and balance!!

Today is the first of November and that means Inktober has officially concluded. And this lady completed a piece for every day of the month of October. No matter what I had to do that day, I scheduled the time to work on each Inktober prompt. It was challenging and fulfilling for quite a few reasons and I am glad I completed all 31 days!

Last year was the first time I attempted to do an Inktober. I started off strong, but wound up in the hospital for about a week and got thrown off. I felt left behind when I got out and just skipped it since I felt like it was pointless. Big mistake. Even if I couldn’t do every day, doing the prompts would still have yielded invaluable experience and a chance to learn about my craft.

This year I was determined to participate and finish each day. I didn’t want to give myself any excuses and I wanted to prove to myself this was something I could do. I mean if I am to have any success in making my comic into a fully visualized creation outside of my head, I have to be dedicated to making it happen. Making a webcomic, especially a long-form one is akin to committing to a long-term relationship.  This comic will require attention, dedication, sacrifice, and compromise. But it will also give me a level of satisfaction, pride, and joy I could only achieve by having it in my life.

Completing Inktober for an entire 31 days was… MOTIVATING AS F*! One of my biggest fears as being a creator has always been the fear of not meeting deadlines or delivering what’s been asked of me. In respect to my own work, I fear the loss of motivation. While I haven’t failed a deadline yet, and through editing everything I have had to deliver has been received by a client that was ultimately pleased, the fear of letting my passion fall to the wayside in favor of vegging out is real. Thanks to completing a full month of Inktober, I learned quite a few things about myself.

1. Word prompts and generators are a blessing to the stuck mind.
   1. Stuck? Don’t know what to draw? Random word generator and draw what comes to your mind from the word. Go a little further out of your comfort zone and try a creature or landscape generator. You will probably come up with things that on average you wouldn’t have thought about. You might learn something about yourself.
2. Having a list to work from gives me direction and keeps me on track.
   1. This is why outlines are important. Having lists keep away the “um-uh” moments where you know you have work to be done, but you don’t know where to start. Lists, bullet journals, schedules, calendars, alerts, whatever, just get what you need to do somewhere that you can refer to.
3. Having a deadline for when I have to post will make me find time for it.
   1. This has always been the case for me, but doing Inktober for 31 days just hammered it in for me.
4. Running out of time leads to creative solutions for reaching the finish line.
   1. I had to have each post up before midnight if it was a  weekend. During work days, I had to finish by 9pm. This lead to a few pieces making me get creative with white space.
5. The tactile feel of paper, pencil, and pen leads to creative solutions.
   1. I wound up using this experiment to explore the seldom-used artist tools looking pretty around my studio space. Randomly playing with my copiics, watercolors, inks, and various pens were fantastic and got me thinking about how I’d like to incorporate them into my work more.
      1. This also got me to make swatch sheets for my different utensils for reference too. Using my various supplies across different surfaces was also pretty neat :>.
6. Don’t be afraid to experiment with artistic mediums, even if the outcome is a mess.
   1. Since it was Inktober and I knew I’d have a new sketch every day, it gave me the courage to experiment more. I had a blast mixing mediums and also figuring out how to “fix” any mistakes I made since I wasn’t worried about every piece being a magnum opus.
7. Mistakes are just a new form being born in art.
   1. Real talk. Mistakes just became a new way embellish or shade a picture and it was liberating!

It was a fantastic experience and I can tell I definitely leveled up as a creator. Through this art challenged I was able to see myself in action working on the issues in myself that I know will be the biggest hurdles to my journey in making this comic. Like the discipline to adhere to a schedule that will facilitate a routine for posting pages (post a day). Be organized so that I know where I’m going and not be overwhelmed with what needs to be done (list of prompts). Last but not least passionate about my comic so that I will look forward to working on it for years to come (Being excited to see how I interpret each prompt). My creative juices are flowing and I’m looking forward to seeing what else springs from these hands after the lessons I’ve learned.

Looking forward to next years Inktober and hopefully, I will see you there.

Check out my Insta for my Inktober art on the left banner. Yup, that’s all me haha!

(One of my fav pieces for the month!)

Achieve the goal you set for yourself by making the time to do them. Even if it’s a little bit at a time.

-Lady T.

 

I sat down to an open word doc and just started word vomiting everything that came to my head about my main character. That spread to the supporting cast and then a bunch of random interactions. Everything flowed out so naturally and I remember thinking this is it. I’m aces at this and this isn’t hard at all. I most have word vomited in that doc over the course of 5 years with little to know to format…

This, of course, meant my first draft was a hot mess and had no direction. Not just plot-wise, but artistically as well. I had no breaks between scenes, no information about the world and its surroundings for drawing reference. It was just a mess,(like my topic hopping on this blog) and incredibly frustrating to go through once I tried to sit down and decipher what I was thinking since I thought I was ready to draw everything out.

Boi that was a setback and rude awakening. Obviously, this wasn’t going to be as easy as I had thought, and so I let myself get defeated and just went back to drawing one-off pieces and being intimidated by my interstate pileup of a word doc.

I knew it needed to be formatted, but I didn’t have the motivation to do it. It wasn’t until I  was lucky enough to catch a free seminar downtown for making comics did I get the direction I needed.

I wish I could remember the speaker so I could give him a shout out. The seminar was actually geared toward submitting work to an anthology he was working on, but he imparted a lot of wisdom in that one hour his seminar lasted.  He imparted great wisdom that got me refocused and working on what to do next. Not only that, but he was very firm about what he was looking for to include in his anthology. He provided script examples, talked about the difference between making a comic and being an illustrator, and was very open to answering questions. It was pretty amazing, and I am glad I went!

I didn’t apply to his anthology project, wasn’t sci-fi or fantasy so it fell flat for me, but I did apply his script outlining techniques to my train wreck. I started fresh and made an outline. I started from the ending and then went to the beginning and made a few things I wanted to see happen character-wise in the middle. From there I add and subtract. It has taken a long time to get everything sorted, and it’s still not complete. That’s ok though. Everything doesn’t have to be a word for word completed before drawing a single page. Having an outline and at least being a chapter ahead of everything=drawn is my obtainable goal. Doing it this way is better for me anyway. I will be able to explore ideas more freely and grow with my comic.

The takeaway… Whenever I used to look at seminars I would shrug them off our look over them. Like why bother when there is the internet, but these gatherings of like-minded individuals and professionals can be amazingly helpful, insightful, and possible networking. Neat tips and tricks, handouts for clarity, Q&A sessions, portfolio reviews. It can seem stuffy to think about, but if you can get in on one you definitely should. Conventions can be fantastic for this too, so go get it!

There’s always another way to approach a problem and you may find it at one of these gatherings.

Word vomiting may get you moving, but an outline will tell you where to go.

-Lady T.

I love it when an artist shares the materials they use to create their work, I’ve had great luck with finding a variety of mediums through checking out the artist of Instagram or Twitter since you can post multiple pictures in one submission. A good bit of folks will also post what they used next to their pictures and that get’s me pumped.

It’s like a mystery case waiting to be solved. Here is the finished product and here’s what I used. Figure out how it came to be! Thanks to Inktober I have been having a blast with that. So far I have done every day in Inktober and it has just been amazing creatively. I’ve been drawing things I wouldn’t naturally think of and it’s been quite the learning experience. It’s also been great on actually using these materials I have on display in my studio. Art supplies aren’t worth jack if you aren’t using them!

I look forward to what my sketchbook looks at once these 31 days are up. I am still working on MagicalMashup! of course, but doing Inktober alongside it is helping me practice with time management and deadlines. Something I can say has been about 30% of my can-do attitude these days. That and getting organized. Oh-me-oh-my getting organized. I’ll talk about that later though.

Art supplies aren’t worth jack if you aren’t using them!