Arrow's Progress 2024.03.08: Launch!
In this Arrow’s Progress:
Graphic Short Story: Launch!
New Cards
Art
Graphic Short Story: Launch!
Off we go!
Shortly after this post you’ll be seeing an announcement of my new graphic short story, Phased. I’ll be posting new pages on Fridays. Those will show up in your inbox and on this site like any other post, but you’ll also be able to see them all in this new Phased section of this substack. While I’m working on Phased, these Arrow’s Progress posts will be more ad hoc in timing.
I made this cool animated title image to use to hype launching Phased on my Instagram accounts. I’m happy with how it turned out, but it was a pain in the butt—the one I’m going with took several hours to make, on top of the many more hours I spent learning to do things and trying to create the animation in three different software packages before settling on the only workable option for me. The second image below was my backup option that I created first and only took a matter of minutes to make. I like how it looks, too.
New Cards
At the graphic novel/comic artist talk last month, one of the artists asked if I had a card. I did not, but I had thought about making one for my creative stuff, so that gave me the push to go ahead and design one. They arrived on Monday, and I’m loving how they turned out. The colors on the logo side! *chef’s kiss*
Brand managers would probably say it’s bad for me to mess with colors (you’ll notice that brands with logo use policies tend to say you can only use them in certain ways, like it must be black or white and no variations, or the blue must be this exact shade of blue, etc.), but whatever, maybe I’ll have a more established “brand” some day.
Art
Be careful what you wish for, lol—I figured out how to get the Pentel Aquash to load more ink into the bristles (just squeeze extra ink out of the barrel if there’s less than you want in the bristles), but now it also seems to sometimes put out a lot more ink than I want. When the bristles are overloaded (you can kinda visually gauge it), I just try to drain it on a paper towel since you can get it drawn back into the barrel. This ends up increasing the ink “burn rate”, though, of course. But I also now know how to monitor the ink coming out of the barrel into the bristles when I squeeze. Though—I gotta say I love the richness of the tone in the spots where the bristles were flooded and way too much ink just sat on top of the paper slowly drying out in the second sketch below (the interior). The sheen of the ink doesn’t show up in these photos.
This discovery happened as I got started on the first sketch I did while I was in Virginia this past weekend for a couple friends’ wedding, so I got to enjoy exploring the tool over all the sketches I did.
