PATREON 2019 UPDATE #1: More process posts!!

I'M OVERHAULING MY PATREON!! Thank you all so much for sticking with me this past year! 2018 was an extremely difficult year for me, and negatively affected my art output in a lot of ways (AS YOU PROBABLY NOTICED.) A month into 2019 and I think I've finally found the real culprit: BURNOUT (yay!? :'U) I feel like I've been pretty burned out for the past two years, but it's taken me a long time to recognize, accept, and come to terms with it. At this point, I feel like my big move to a new state and some new exciting projects are starting to pull me out of the hole and I'm getting my spark back in a real way. So I just want to repeat: THANKS!! Thanks so much for your patience with me. I want to refurbish my Patreon with smart, efficient changes that will make updates more regular and content more plentiful! I hope you'll stick around to see what I come up with! 

As part of my 2019 Patreon overhaul, I wanted to make my art process more available to all of you! One thing I'll be posting is step by step page process breakdowns with commentary. If there's anything else I've been doing that you're interested in learning more about, please let me know in the comments! 

Patrons at the $3 tier will get thumbnail, pencils and ink work for each SAKANA update, the day after the update is posted publicly. 

Patrons at the $5 tier will get the same process work early, and from future pages that have not yet been published. 

And every now and then, when I have a panel I'm particularly fond of, I'll make a public post like this one for everybody to see! Please enjoy this Chie bonanza: 

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1. When I start penciling a panel I tend to draw the same lines over and over and over again, and somehow, SOMEHOW, my brain is able to parse through all of it and pick out the right line when it comes time to ink it. Maybe something about seeing all possibilities at the same time??  

2. In the last few years I think my lineart has gotten more uniform than the first 200 or so pages of SAKANA, mostly because I'm using a smaller brush pen that I started out with. I miss the extra thick lines that the original pen could give me, but ultimately I think the control I get with the new(er) pen makes the art easier to read visually. 

Incidentally, this is probably the fastest part of my whole comic-making process. It took me 5 minutes to lay down these basic outlines. 

3. I was trying to go for some sort of soft shoujo sparkle effect, but it took me a bit of trial and error to render. There is a LOT of extra ink around these sparkles on this page. I almost started going through the paper. 

4. At this point I blacked in her hair and made decisions about how much hatching and rendering I wanted on her clothes. I wanted the panel to look a little more hazy and rendered than normal because Jiro is viewing her with ~*amour*~ 

5. And done! I beefed up the hatching under her arm a little. I was going to try for some kind of god ray effect in the background but ultimately that would have competed with the hatching and high contrast on her face and clothes so I just went with a standard black fill. The sparkle in the top right got a little fudged so I blacked it out before scanning. 

You can read this page HERE: http://www.sakana-comic.com/comic/545

I hope you guys like the idea of seeing more of my process work! Let me know what you think! :) 

-Mad