“Men have become the tools of their tools.”
― Henry David Thoreau
The last time I had to fill in a form, just holding the pen felt unnatural. In school you write all the time. Once you start working, not so much. Give me a keyboard and I’m happy. I type very fast. It’s a shame that I can’t use a keyboard to create a webcomic. Which coincidentally is what I plan to do, in case you missed last week’s blog post.
There’s currently two big problems with my webcomic plan:
- The lack of artistic ability.
- The lack of time.
I’m not going to suddenly try to draw. As much as I would like to learn to do so, I know it will take a lot of time to become efficient at. I can’t even remember the last time I tried to draw anything. Which means I’ll have to find a more technical way of generating the art.
Then with time being so limited it needs to be a way to generate this art quickly and efficiently. Initially this blog will only consist of a new article every Sunday but when it becomes a webcomic I would like to release a comic at least twice a week. Three times a week would be ideal.
My solution is to create templates using vector art. Raster graphics won’t work for me since it’s time consuming and you need actual talent and experience to pull that off. But programmer art (vector art) will be perfect.
I can create scenes, objects and characters and save them as templates, ready to be dropped into a comic. These templates can be manipulated to fit the scene and hopefully not look too bad.
My main tool will be Affinity Designer. I already own it because I use it to plan out website and app user interfaces. My experience with it is mainly just moving templates around so it will be a learning experience but I will write an entry about the process.
At work I’m currently working on an Android application and had to buy a tablet now. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 comes with a pen which is ideal for this project. So I’m in the lucky situation where I’ll have a shiny new toy at the end of the month to play with that comes with some nice tools of the trade. I can make use of vector graphic apps on the tablet like Inker and use that in conjunction with the software on my pc and hopefully create something decent.
Who needs talent when you’ve got proper tools?
I guess we’ll see.
