the life of an illustrator working on a graphic novel
hi guys good morning i'm very sleepy today and most likely i'm not going to make sense whatsoever good morning and welcome to a new studio vlog sometimes i worry that you guys are going to be bored of watching me working at my studio complaining about the street noise um because i love studio vlogs yet sometimes i i wonder and i feel so conscious that you guys are getting bored of me but anyway um i'm going to be gentle on myself and not worry too much about this so in that sense i was thinking about this this morning that i feel very lucky that i'm still able to come to my studio every day despite the fact that the kobe cases in new york city are going so up you guys we're having lots of cases per day and i am incredibly lucky not only because i have a studio but also because i'm able to walk every day to my studio i don't have to take the subway like no no like public transportation whatsoever i barely see people on the street and i am the only human who steps in this studio so this studio is like an extension of my apartment so that's the only reason why i'm not working from home because i present no threats to myself and to anyone else whatsoever and also i wear a mask basically as soon as i step outside of this studio so um i needed to say this out loud in case you were wondering why in the world i am still going to my studio if we're going through a global pandemic that's the reason so for today guys i am actually trying notion so i've been i've been seeing people use notion for more than a year now and um at the beginning of 2021 i decided to give it a go because i'm like okay i have nothing to lose yet i feel very overwhelmed by notion in the beginning because like the sky is the limit and you can do whatever you want with it it's basically a software that you use to organize yourself and everything is in one place basically so i tried you guys to have a weekly schedule because i needed to see guys where my time was going because i had no system in order to organize how much time each week each project was taking me and also because i felt very anxious at the beginning of this year of like oh my god i feel like i have so many things to do how am i going to organize organize and balance my week in order for me to work on all of these projects at the same time without driving myself crazy so i'm testing this out um as you can see i have lots of things like in each day i mean not lots of things but like usually my days divide in two like the things that i do in the morning and the things that i do in the afternoon and um i also managed to put um like a drawing session at the end of the week because i found myself enjoying a lot um like a set time for me to experiment and to practice things that i need to work on on my illustration skills so i really love to have that like play time so to speak playtime sounds dirty and weird but i hope you know what i mean like unproductive quote unproductive time for my art and also as soon as i crack the system with notion i'm gonna share with you like do an ocean tour in case you wanted to i'm not i'm not an expert on motion in any way i've seen people do wonders with notion i am not that person but so far it's been working out for me so i'm very happy anyway uh right now you guys is tuesday i'm supposed to be edit editing yet or or filming video so that's what i'm doing right now and also this afternoon i wanna make progress with the um instagram comic so let me see if i can show you really quickly where is it so this isn't a sketch of what i want to do for you it probably makes no sense whatsoever yet for me it does make sense because it's my schedule i can read it so i'm going to work on this sketch right now and then uh most likely it's going to be done today because a very short comic is only one page so thank god for past friend because she managed to do a one comic page instead of like a three page comic so anyway let's do this guys so so foreign so foreign so bye so so i love that i was going to show you like look how clean it looks but my floor it's very patchy and stone like so you won't be able to see a before and after of what it used to look like so you have to trust me on this one it's clean and also i managed to get rid of tons of boxes and like things that we weren't using anymore i know it looks super chaotic but again you'll have to trust me that it's way cleaner than than before so i just have lunch and i also finished the comic these are some of the sketches that uh you saw me doing it's funny how i'm describing things that you already watch but anyway so these are the sketches and the comic turn on like this and right now you guys since tomorrow is wednesday and i have therapy during the morning i won't be able to work on the store so i will work on that right now working on the store means designing new sketches for tote bags and t-shirts and also planning ahead my year and like lunches i want to do and stuff like that so yeah that's what i'm going to do throughout my afternoon hmm so please focus please there you go hi you guys good morning happy friday friday um i am currently working on my graphic novel which is the thing that i fear the most because this is the thing you guys that um i've been avoiding for so long yet i love challenges so um this graphic novel is just very overwhelming for me because it's a mixture of lots of characters in one scene drawing scenery and freaking cars and the interior of cars and people talking and perspective so as you might guessed yes it's just the worst case scenario for an illustrator and right now um this past week i've been working on a couple of pages that i'm sure i will be able to share with you later but today i'm working on this mofo and i've been struggling you guys with this page so much because okay let me show you the process i've been sharing this with my patrons but i thought it might be interesting uh to share this with you guys as well so this is the page is i don't know if you can see it there you go it's a character walking in a very like weird perspective and then she's opening the car's door and she's talking to the person who is um sitting down on the passenger seat but the thing is you guys every time i encounter a weird perspective or a post that i'm not familiarized with i tend to google the poses because um illustrators i mean it's it's basically impossible to draw everything from memory especially when the poses are tricky so i started taking pictures of myself pretending i am leaning against an open door a lot like a car with the open door and it's just so like if you see these pictures without context i realize the post is not working very well because i am imagining that i'm leaning against a car which i am not and i felt very afraid of actually doing this on the street because people in new york city can be um scary and intimidating when you're near their cars and you're taking pictures of their cars so i um i asked my friend rodrigo if i could pose and he took the pictures from me and these are the pictures that we took together and i'm so grateful to do this because i know it's just one scene you guys it's just one frame but i want to encourage people and artists and illustrators that it's absolutely okay to draw with their reference because it will look more realistic it will look more natural like the pose rather than like i am not very good with poses they always look very stiff they don't look very good so if i can do something in order to improve my illustration skills and make the graphic novel more enjoyable for the reader i am going to do so i'm gonna do it so please don't feel bad when using references i think you need to use references if you're not an illustrator or artist i had this myth when i was starting with illustration that artists could draw everything from memory which is a big fat lie yeah that's that's not the case i mean you can draw lots of things from memory but when it comes down to tricky poses or vehicles or big machines or even trees baby you need the reference and that's okay so if you can't find it online just have a fun photoshoot photoshoot photoshoot by yourself so right now i'm going to see if i can make this scene work yeah i want yeah hi guys i just finished the page and oh my god i'm so happy i took that reference picture because you made sorry the entire difference let me show you so you probably already saw or have seen the before and this is the after you guys oh my god probably for you is like friendly look exactly the same but to me my loves it just it looks so accurate and more realistic even though it's still an illustration it's a cartoon it has my style the pose gives everything like such character and dynamism to the illustration and oh my god i'm so proud anyway so right now you guys i decided that there you go i decided that i'm going to share the entire process of a page because i've been sharing this with patreon uh on lens which is like the instagram stories of patreon and they have been super grateful and interested in an entire process so i'm like i might as well just like share this whole thing with you guys as well um i don't know if i will be able to share all of the pages but right now i'm about to share i'm about to share right now i'm about to start drawing the page 11. so the first thing that i do you guys is i check my storyboard i worked on the storyboard last year um and this is the page that we're going to draw today so this is one of the main characters and she's just waking up and she sees a letter on the floor and then she reads it reads it and then she like crumbles the paper and toss it out and the first thing that i do you guys is i grab my shitty paper and i don't know if you can see but there's holes on the edges of the paper i did this on a previous video but this paper you guys is too big for my printer it doesn't fit my printer so i can't print the framing of the page so what i do is just i grab one of those um one of this like board pins i don't know what they're called and i simply take one page as a guideline and then i just stick one of the pins on every corner and every division of the page because every page is divided in three parts so here's one probably you can't see it but there's another one there's another one and there's another one and then i simply take my ruler i had no idea by the way these were a thing they're very useful because if you press them like this they will just you can draw straight lines and like parallel lines and since this whole thing is transparent it also helps a lot to create lines anyway they're very cheap and they're great anyway so the first thing that i do is i draw the page framing and in this case we have the main um the mainframe frame square window and then three on the side and this whole thing is open and that's the first thing i do and now i'm going to proceed to draw a rough sketch so let me get back to you once i have the rest of the rough sketch ready so hi guys good afternoon it's been too long um but here i am i am at my studio as you can see and right now i think i still have one hour or less than an hour to work on a page spread page spread so as you know why am i being so awkward it's because i haven't filmed in a couple of days that's what happened uh so as you guys know i'm working on this marvelous graphic novel and today i have to start because of no way i'm going to finish this today this sequence in which she is getting dressed but i have no idea how to draw this because as you guys know i'm an illustrator but i can draw everything from memory so what i was thinking was to film a video of myself doing the same sequence so i can have a guidance you know so i can know exactly what it looks like a person dressing up and picking something from the floor and then what i usually do is i take screenshots of that video and then i draw it i have been actually practicing this because the other i came upon this video online of lauren what's her name she's an actress is she an actress i don't know leslie karan and um i did this illustration of a video uh i just mirror lipstick on the page and um i've been doing this a lot of like i i don't know like encounter randomly videos online of women dancing or twirling or doing some like funny fun movements and then i take screenshots of those movements and then i draw them overlapping with each other and it's been so nice because i can practice like poses and um i don't know it's been really fun i actually did it again in one of like another page around here there you go so um she was just twirling but i love her dress and i want to do exactly this thing i mean not twirling but like taking a screenshot of a video and see if i can recapture that um sequence so let's see if that works out i might have to close the curtains because even though i'm not getting naked i don't know if my neighbors will find this interesting this is what we have right now you guys so what i was thinking was to stand i will have to lower the camera a little bit uh and press play and that could work so let me see if i can make this work this is just a theory there you go thank god i'm wearing leggings otherwise it would have been butt naked so the character takes her t-shirt off and then look at me i can't believe i'm showing this to the entire internet it's fine and then um there's a sequence in which you see she's like pulling her trousers up on and then i had no idea which way to turn and then the last pose i mean no the second to last is her tire like tying her hair up and i was trying to see if i could walk while doing it so it could have like more dynamism and then she's um picking up her phone from the floor so i was trying like different ways in which i could do that so let me take a few screenshots and i'll show you the result oh uh my hair though you guys um hello god i feel so dizzy just by staring at this illustration um sketch so i i thought just for one second that when i was done with it and then i stood up and i realized that the boxes they have another their own perspective and man why did i put those boxes in the room i mean it makes sense because one of the characters is like super messy and she still has boxes from like laying around in her room so i get that there's boxes around um oh my god you guys so but i will have to not start everything from scratch but i have to erase the boxes again and the issue is that i thought the boxes were okay i did a very rough sketch and they look fine so then i sketched on top of the rough sketch which is something that i always i always do and it work works fine but i guess since it's such a complex like i mean maybe for you guys this is like super easy to do but i am not used to doing perspective in background and like things in between multiple characters and a double spread so uh let me show you what i'm talking about so i don't know if you can see the characters look okay actually um i'm so proud that i did all of this you know and then i took the pictures and i was the model but the issue is that these boxes do not look okay uh i almost feel ashamed of showing destroy to you guys not because i think it's a bad drawing like if we cover this it's actually decent but since the perspective of this box is so off yeah the the lines basically should be aligned with the bed but it's almost as if the bed has one perspective and the boxes are lifted this way you know what i'm saying can you see what i'm talking about so i will have to do this again so i think you guys what i'm going to do is i'm going to retrace this muffle so i'm going to grab my you know what i'm talking about my light box thank you so much for reminding me the word i'm going to bring my light box and i'm going to re-trace this mofo on top because if i erase this paper if i erase these lines like i'm going to like the whole paper is going to disintegrate that's not even a word no it's going to disappear it's going to fall apart it's going to this you know i'm making no sense whatsoever you guys i'm going through a very bad crappy english day oh man if you're native in english oh god you're so lucky uh but i'm not so i struggle and on top of that this morning i had a zoom live drawing meeting with my patrons thank god they like it was with them because otherwise it would have been a meeting it would have been doomed and it's very tricky you guys when you're speaking a language that it's not your natives like language and you have something really important to do and you're like oh please like i need this i need to you know um perform well thank god i'm not like interviewing um or like doing some like super important meetings and my patrons are super patient and understanding but it's just oh god uh anyway i'm not being hard on myself i'm just like complaining with you guys anyway so i can't stare at this page anymore so i'm going to wrap up uh both of these spreads and i think i'm going to continue this tomorrow makes me sad though because i'm i didn't finish these pages today i thought i was going to finish these pages but i am no but that's okay i mean i made a huge progress and most likely i'm going to be done with them tomorrow so these are very long updates um hey huh
2021-01-30 21:56
