Manners

I decided to try drawing a page in PaintSAI as an experiment, since I've heard people say lots of nice things about it. I don't think the difference are that noticeable in the result though. It is a nice piece of software with some good features, but for my purposes I'm not sure if it's that much nicer than what I already have in the cheap version of Painter that came with my tablet. I guess I'll go back to Painter for the next page, and see if I miss any of SAI's features enough to justify forking over the 5400 Yen.

SAI did have the effect of forcing me to really rush through drawing the last bunch of panels to get them finished before the free trial ran out. (Since when does it take me 30 days to draw a page, darn it?) Then after everything was done and exported I realized I had accidentally combined my background layer into the foreground layer at low opacity at an unknown point when I was working on the page, resulting in the weird faded backgrounds in a few of the early panels. I didn't realize until it was too late to undo, though I managed to fix a few of them with Photoshop filters. It's possible that the non-faded versions of the other panels still exist in one of the .sai files I can't open right now, so if I do end up buying SAI perhaps I can fix them then.

We should hopefully be saying hello to Wattson next page. I say "hopefully" because I had intended this page to end with Zizzy on Wattson's doorstep, and yet for some reason we seem to be climbing into a culvert. Honestly, I feel like my creative process on this comic is a little messed up sometimes. I write scripts for my episodes in advance, but then when I get to working on them I change my mind and rewrite them completely. Then I decide I don't like the new version anymore and start off in a different direction half way through the page with no script at all. There are bits of this page that were improvised one panel at a time, and I think it sort of shows.