getting organized Archives - Musings & Things by Lady T.

Musing about Creative Goals 2k21

Posted on March 5, 2021 by Lady T. Musings

Hey Y’all, I’m Lady T. and I make the New Adult Fantasy Comic MagicalMashup!

We are moving through the New Year and folks are either working on New Year’s resolutions or moving past them. I’m not the biggest fan of resolutions as they sound so do-or-die with little room for adjustment, and when not met exactly as stated just makes me feel like… why should I even bother D: BUT you know what I’m a big fan of? Goals! Making goals any time of the year with strategies to reach them heifers is my jam!

Whenever I make goals I try to make them specific to an area I want to improve on instead of being general with them. Like instead of saying “I want to draw more this year.” I’ll say > “I want to complete 1 finished work of art once a month that is either for a friend/collaboration or towards my _Fantastical Lovers collection.”_ a side project that I work on that brings me joy featuring creature and non-creature folks romancing each other with the occasional short story to go with XD. I have posted some on my Insta, but plan to do more on my Patreon down the road since it’s self-indulgent a-f and I don’t wanna worry about censorship :).

This goal takes into account that I am working on a comic and a wedding and I want these goals to be realistic things I can accomplish so I’m spacing them out quite a bit. Being able to reach the goal is such a big part of the goal making process y’all. Being able to reach the goals you set is such a high. It’s Addictive.

These are my creative goals for the new year (had them formatted but the forum wigged out sooo yeah)

Throw a fun A$$ wedding! That’s on my list bc if y’all hadn’t figured it out yet, I’m pretty extra and I decided that I’d be doing all the Graphic Design work for the wedding and assembled a team of bombastic buddies to help me with the other DIY elements. I Just finished designing, layouts, and printing! I will be cutting, stuffing, stamping, and mailing invitations in the next 2 weeks (pat pat on the back haha). Sneak peek

(It’s adventure fantasy-themed so I’m having a blast with that theme and getting artsy as funk with it!)

Participate in at least 2 art challenges. Last year I did #worldwatercolormonth

but didn’t do any others which was a bit of a bummer as I usually do #Inktober or #drawtober and one other like #24hrcomicday (that one is madness, but I did it once) or #folktaleweek. I’m thinking of #huevember for this year and #Worldwatercolormonth again as it was so nice to practice another medium and get immersed in the process of painting traditionally. Huevember bc I LOVE color and exploring the depths of one color a piece should be a great exercise for me and there are always such lovely results posted.
My backup will be participating in at least 3 artist hashtags that last at least 3 days with new original work for them. There was a calendar of # posted a while back (this is rare for me but I don’t have a link to it:sweat_01: sorry y’all, but maybe someone knows it and will share, and I put a bunch of the dates in my planner). I know this year is going to be busier than usual for me, but art is my passion so I will make time for it (outside of my comic that I very much love making :purple_heart: )

Finish drawing and post chapter 2 and start drawing chapter 3 of my comic MagicalMashup! Each chapter is about 30 pages so yeah; I’m in it for the long haul XD. I’ve genuinely gotten faster at making pages now vs 3 years ago (still not Sonic speeds yet lol). The only thing slowing me down is working a full-time job during the day, haha, but it be like that. Maybe someday I’ll be able to contribute to my household through just working on my art, but It’s not something I’d peg our livelihood on any time soon, and that’s ok (as for as capitalist societies go anyway ahah).

Start a YouTube channel called Musing with Lady T. where I post my speed paints and muse about that creative life. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but want to put effort into it so I’m trying to figure out how I want to go about it. I’ve seen some lovely folks on this forum who have YouTubes and I’m inspired! Totally open to suggestions and tips too!

Anywho, I want to know what kind of creative goals y’all have going on or recently accomplished and want to pat yourself on the back for!

TLDR: My creative goals for the year are 1. Throw a fly wedding. 2. Participating in 2 art challenges. 3. Start posting Chapter 2 of my comic MagicalMashup! and getting to work on ch. 3. 4. Start a Musing with Lady T. YouTube channel. Tell me about yours!

Let’s Muse: Colors

Posted on February 26, 2021 by Lady T. Musings

Hey Y’all, I’m Lady T. and I make the New Adult Fantasy Comic MagicalMashup!

One of the core elements I decided before starting the comic is that it would be in color. I choose to go this route because, well for one, I LOVE color, but also because it would be a way for me to get in the habit of thinking about color and studying how using color can impact a scene.

A blind oc named Luel with long blue dreads that he keeps tied up a top his head. He is also a mage with a neat support skill.

Coloring a comic that I work on by myself is defiantly a whole extra thing, but I enjoy it and love to see my blackish (I don’t use black in the art for the comic as it’s a very stark and powerful color that commands too much attention in my bright magical world lol) lineart come to life!

When I first started drawing the comic I had a time trying to decide on the character and world color pallets. Due to how expansive fantasy worlds can get I quickly realized I’d need a way to organize my color choices. That is once I figured out what colors I’d be using that is…

Color is such a mindblowing thing that is as complex and vast a subject as it is beautiful. Up until I decided to make the comic, I had no need to keep track of color palettes, even for reoccurring characters. I could just fudge it and guess close enough and be good. That wouldn’t fly with a whole comic though. I started crafting my colors with the characters in mind first and thinking that the colors for each character should tell a little about their personalities.

Junah leaving home to start that independent life

Junah is an overall optimistic person that is very open and excitable, maybe too much so, but it is what it is haha, so I choose upbeat colors for her.

Kaelen on the other hand is more of a grounded person with a more reserved personality and so I choose colors that are more mature.

I had a lot of fun picking their colors, but then I had to think about shading and highlights… that’s when things got really interesting.

When it comes to shading I used to just color pick the base skin tone and just use the color slider in ClipStudio to go down (add black) for shade and up (and white) for highlight.

(Original page from my practice comic MagicalBeginnings! ).

The old practice pages I did foe the comic. Still cannon, just changed my coloring approach to be more lively and magical feeling.

This works aight’, but I found that it felt flat in my newly designed colorful world. I was thinking of ways to improve on this when I found a Twitter thread started by a comic colorist names Marissa Louise talking about resources for learning about color for artists.

Now I thought I was color literate before, but wow did my eyes get opened to the possibilities I hadn’t thought of when it comes to color. I checked out all of the books and resources from the list I could and watched the videos recommended. Afterward, I revised my character sheets and started to look at where my colors were placed on the color wheel using this online Color Wheel. Being able to easily see the different color harmony rules affecting my color choices live was (is) so helpful for deciding what can work with your base color selections.

Once I got my colors selected and was happy, I had to figure out a way to make them easily accessible as I’d be using them often. At first, I just made color dots on each character sheet from print screens of my color pics that I could reference, but copy-pasting them onto each page to color pick form was annoying (even if it looks cool).

Another way I used to keep Track colors, way to much going on though …

I then found out about saving color swatches into palettes in ClipStudio and BOOM!! Game changed.
(ClipStudio palette, admittedly not as organized as I wanted).

I would have stuck with ClipStudio if I hadn’t started using an iPad to give myself more time to work on the comic when not at home, but switching to Procreate offered the same options for being able to color swatch and the color picker tools were a bit more intuitive for me since I knew how I wanted to approach color for my comic.

I really like the snappy ness and convenience of working in Procreate. Keeps me from getting to buck wild.

The main difference I found was that CipStudio offers more spaces in their swatch palette for more colors than Procreate, but honestly, I’ve found simplifying what I have to be the better option for me. Keeps things manageable and I’m able to work faster this way.

You still get a good bit of options and you can also make a secondary palette to the main one in Procreate, so if you must have more you still can.

Anywho I’m curious about how y’all do your color crafting. Do you use color in your work or stick to monochrome? Fall somewhere in between? What made you decide to go this route? How do you keep track of all of your colors or values that are used repeatedly in your work? I’d love to hear your thoughts/process!

TLDR: There’s a lot that goes into the decision to work in color. I talk about my process from starting with flat color to learning how to incorporate harmonies in my palettes thanks to a few resources and how I use said colors as references in my work. I’m curious to know y’all’s thoughts on the subject.

Let’s Talk about the Technical Side of Creating

Posted on January 22, 2021 by Lady T. Musings

Hi Y’all!

TLDR at the bottom 🙂 as I like to talk and am very aware.

As MagicalMashup! is my first long form comic (that I’ve posted online) I’m constantly learning new things about making comics and the most effective ways to use my time. I started creating my comics in ClipStudio (drawing and layouts), Adobe Photoshop (color correcting and formatting), and Adobe Illustrator (text placement and word bubbles) on my The Panda City Yiynova MSP19 Tablet Monitor hooked up to my PC at a desk. The Yiynova tablet screen monitor was my answer to Wacom’s Cintiq back in 2012, as I didn’t (still don’t) have the cash money to sink into a high end graphic display tablet. Options were still slim for anything that wasn’t Wacom for graphics tablets, but some competition had started to show up. I jumped on the research wagon and decided to go with the the Yiynova display tablet from Panda City bc price and reviews by a few artist bloggers at the time.

Once I figured out how to hook everything up and got the correct drivers installed, it worked like a charm (still up and running now actually) for almost a decade (baring a few minor hiccups with updates that were sorted out through reading a few forum posts). The only thing I missed that Wacom had was the tactile feeling the screens have that makes drawing on the screen not feel like you’re drawing on slippery glass :V, butttttttt a large screen protector can help with that. The other thing I would have liked was having the customizable side buttons on the Cintiq display mirrored on the Yiynova. The Yiynova pen also wasn’t as sturdy feeling in the hand and needed a battery to operate, but I got used to it and I only changed the battery like 5 times in the time that I’ve had it so eh. For the price I paid (sub $600) those things were just slight QOL things and I was too busy being mad excited for being able to draw directly on a surface I could see my hands doing the work.

My messy work area but you see the setup

(Not the best pic of my setup, but I forgot to take a new pic for the post at home.)

As much as I love my tablet screen monitor set up at my desk and swivel arm attachment, I work a day job and spend about half of my day not at home. Once I started getting serious about making my comic and planning my time out accordingly, I just kept lamenting on how much time I could be spending between breaks and when I’m not at home getting more work done if I could travel with my tablet screen. I was chatting with a techy friend of mine who told me about the 2018 iPad and how it was a cheaper model of iPad that had access to the Apple Pencil. I went over to a tech store, tried out one of the displays, and fell in LOVE. Bought it my next paycheck. It is so dang neat and portable and I can go on, but yeah.

I loved it, but after drawing on a tablet screen that was 3x bigger than the new tablet it was a bit rough. Not to mention the main program I was using at the time ClipStudio does not have the best interface for small screens, so I Iooked around the App Store and that’s when I found Procreate. It’s not specifically geared towards creating comics like ClipStudio, but I’ve been able to use it for that purpose just fine. The creators of the Procreate app release updates with new features often enough to make a difference too and it’s a one-time buy app as well. Since using the app, they’ve added a text tool and animation assist and I look forward to what new things they decide to roll out as well. They have a community tab that has a forum and gallery too!

Since the text tool wasn’t around when I first started making the comic in Procreate, I needed to find something else besides Adobe Illustrator as I was not buying that again. That’s when I found Affinity. Affinity is comparable to the Adobe creative suite at a fraction of the cost. They have tablet and desktop versions of their apps Designer and Photo with Publisher that’s just been released for desktop. Affinity Designer was exactly what I was looking for to edit my typography for word bubble typesetting and branding. It also has vector tools as well!!! I could go on about them, and just might at a later date haha.

Even with the program switches to software with a better interface for a tablet and using the 2018 iPad, the screen was still to dang small for me. I looked into upgrading and was fortunate enough to find an Ipad Pro 2017 within my budget on Swappa (I love this site for finding used tech for resale by owners as they authenticate merchandise and allow reviewing).

Upgrading to the Ipad Pro line was such a shift for my productivity. I could work on larger canvas sizes with more layers, everything loaded faster and crashes were a thing of the past. The biggest upside was of course the 12.9in screen size and amount of gigs the tablet came with, but I was also pleasantly surprised with the number of applications available for content creators that have good design and work well.

(can work on the comic like anywhere now)

There are a ton of options for creator setups and I have no idea what mines will look like a few years from now, but this is working out so far. What kind of setup do you all have for creating and what programs or tools do you use for making your comics or novels?

TLDR: I started off tied to my desk using my budget graphic display tablet with ClipStudio and Adobe products and then switched to a mobile setup using the Ipad Pro Procreate and Affinity Designer. What’s your content creator setup and what programs/tools do you use?

Putting Idle Hands to Work

Posted on June 4, 2020 by Lady T. Musings

Over the last (psha when was the last time I posted…hmmnn) year a ton has happened to the world we live in from a societal view. Things are and will be different due to this Pandemic. I find myself thinking how sci-fi this should seem, but it’s reality. I was out of work for 6 weeks and while at home the anxiety, nerves, fear and worry were a constant nag on my sanity (still are as we are still in the midst of the Pandemic as I write this), but I have been back at work since May 1st, so yeah… Staying sanatised, busy, and masked up.

During the whole 6 weeks away from work, I put a lot of my anxiety and nerves at ease by staying busy. It’s true I spent a ton of time playing video games like Death Stranding, Plants vs Zombies, Borderlands and ahhh that’s not important lol, I mean a gal needs to decompress and get lost in some fictional immersion when it’s at the point where hearing someone cough gets folks jumpy. That’s not all I did, I also spent a lot of time reading and researching about color, light, form, storytelling, and making comics in general AND making my CODEX for my comic. All things that I have been doing, but during this time at home, I really got the time to dive deep into these areas and make some good headway on all fronts.

My pent up energy flowed through my fingertips most afternoons (bc ya’ll know I slept in every day!) and into connecting the lore of my fantasy world Magos to the characters that reside in it. Having my darling as a sounding board, and asker of questions I never would have thought about (extremely helpful when trying to figure out character reactions and motivations fyi) made the days fly by. Finally my reference notes and musings on my Fantasy world, it’s customs, and people is done. Something I had been meaning to refine for years completed within the 6 weeks of staying home and trying to stay safe.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot easier for me to understand and see more clearly what I am trying to create in this New Adult Fantasy comic about a fat and black mage gal with a unique ability leaving her hidden home in Faiewood for the first time and making her way to the Institute of Magical, Mystical and Mythical Arts (IMMMA) where here story truly begins in the Heart of Lufiriya; a nation filled with a multitude of beings of magic and technology working and living side by side. It’s a lot to take in for Junah, our protagonist, but it’s also the start of an exciting new chapter in her life (One I look forward to sharing).

Though I don’t think this is something necessary to do for all comic creators or even story tellers, it defiantly is a helpful resource to have as reference if you are working in sci-fi or fantasy. This probably would have been more helpful to hear during the height of the stay at home business, but here I am now and this info still holds true for anyone who wishes to work on getting their story out their, but have idle hands and don’t know where to direct that energy. Gather your resources into a binder, book, word doc, whatever. Just get it together. It may not be what you think you should be doing but hey, starting somewhere is better than not starting at all.

Now that I am back to work and having to manage my time a lot more efficiently, I’m working to figure out the best approach to maximizing my creative output each day. I’ve started doing 1hr in the studio each weekday save Mondays, as Mondays are MagicalMashup! Mondays and is reserved specifically for working on the comic. I’m also breaking all my notebooks up because having all my notes and markings in one book is to confusing to refer back to late. This is working for me, but also means I have like 3 notebooks I carry around daily. Though I also carry a large purse so HA, I’m game.

Next post I would like to share some of the reading materials That I have found *super effective* and how I plan to use what I’ve picked up!

Stay safe.

Tag: getting organized

Musing about Creative Goals 2k21

Let’s Muse: Colors

Let’s Talk about the Technical Side of Creating

Putting Idle Hands to Work

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