Got a new Scopa card (mostly; just noticed the missing icons, number & title on the bottom). I thought I’d try doing this character from the back just because I thought the bun & chopsticks would look neat that way.

There’s a back-view baseball pitcher coming up too, hopefully.

So actually the top image has been sitting on my computer for like months now. Didn’t add it to my gallery, didn’t send it to the client, didn’t have any motivation whatsoever to move this project along.

I’m not sure what the deal is. I want this project out of the way so I can concentrate on other things. This is, as far as I can tell, a fun, interesting project. I’m happy with my output. It’s for free of course, but the client has reacted positively to the drawings I’ve sent.

I should, all things considered, be highly motivated to get this done.

So in an effort to get back on track, here’s a guess about my lack of motivation: it’s surprisingly tedious.

My first image for this project took like forty five minutes to an hour to complete. Each image thereafter has taken two or three hours.

You’d think it would go faster, the more images I produced, but in many ways, trying to get new images to match the existing ones is harder than coming up with things from scratch. I suppose that’s a skill I need to work on. My workflow could clearly be more efficient, for this and any other project that involves hand-drawn illustrations. Which is most of them.

What I’m doing right now is, I’ve got a basic character template printed out. I’ll trace that with real pencil and paper for new characters, take a picture of my new drawing, then trace that in Illustrator.

There are many parts of this process that are a bit janky, most notably the duplication of effort with the traditional drawing and the Illustrator tracing. But I think the big issue right now is just getting my pencil & paper drawing into the computer. Right now the process looks like this:

• Find a nice bright spot to place my drawing.
• Take a picture with my phone.
• Realize that the light wasn’t bright enough for the picture to come out.
• Futz with camera settings, relocate random lamps from around the house and try again.
• Email the picture to myself.
• Download the email attachment on my laptop.

This is, of course, less than ideal. My scanner broke years ago,  and my new phone blows up if you try using it as a USB drive, hence the icky multi-step process.

Ideally, I’d hold up my drawing in front of my web camera and just skip the external scanning/photo taking devices entirely. I have no idea if that would work, but it’s a thought. 😉

In the absence of that though, some sort of photo-taking setup with a bright light right in my office might be helpful. A desk lamp pointing at a clipboard on the wall (desk space is really tight), or maybe an improvised light box taking advantage of the fact that my desk is made of glass. Something like that. Anything to make this more frictionless.

I should see if I can cobble something together from random stuff in the house.