busybee comics

Grargh, I’ve got to figure out some way of speeding up my workflow. This comic’s too time-consuming considering the amount of free time I have right now. I might just switch to black-and-white for a while, though that seems kinda lame since actually coloring the comics isn’t what takes all the time. I’ve already stopped shading things and pared backgrounds down to the bare minimum, though, and really all that’s left to speed up is the foregrounds.

The only way to speed up foregrounds is to start doing copy-paste on everything, which is something I see as a last resort.

On the plus side, I recently ordered a larger Wacom tablet and that might speed things up a bit. (Currently I use the smallest one, which means to get any sort of precision I have to zoom way in and this means I spend more time scrolling around than actually drawing, and the extreme size mismatch between screen and pen was pretty frustrating too.)

I might also experiment with actually drawing the strip on paper and just using the computer to color and letter it, though I’m not sure if that would really help any.

You may have noticed that the comic is all black-and-white. It turns out that coloring the strip does take a significant amount of time after all. So I’m experimenting with a more minimalist presentation for the time being.

Please don’t hate me!

Especially because I’ve been having some pretty severe carpal tunnel issues recently, and so I need to reduce the amount of hand-using free time activities I do. So the comic is on hold for now anyway.

I might experiment with other ways of updating the comic, though, like I’m considering using modeling clay or something, at least as a temporary diversion. Dunno yet. It’s pretty frustrating because I have lots and lots of ideas for comic stuff!