If you’ve been following my comic posts over at www.piday.ca you may have already noted that I’m kicking into a new season where I’ll be moving away from Inkscape art and into the new and ever-exciting realm of digital sketching.
My toolkit for this enterprise takes me away from the mouse and desktop and into the stylus and tablet, specifically (at least for right now as I post this) I’m using an iPad Pro + an Apple Pencil + Procreate 5.
Ultimately, my plan is to make This is Pi Day into a multi-modal art project and less of a so-called comic strip. That said, cartooning is one of my prime loves and motivations for the project, so it will always have a bit of a comic/toon flare that will be at its heart and core.
Procreate is a paid app on iPadOS that is about near to professional as this hobby-artist needs right now, and it has a supremely interesting output feature — assuming one sketches through from start to finish on a final project without major deviation from plan: video timelapse. In the settings menu, it’s as simple as selecting video timelapse and saving the file. What you get is something like the video embedded above, a sped up stroke-by-stroke animation of the sketch.
In this particular case, I output and uploaded the video, then went back and spent another hour messing around with the lighting in the final panel before marking it as DONE. So, the video doesn’t completely match the final product… but close enough to make the point.
Watching the video I personally enjoy looking back on the conception of the piece from rough sketch through final product. I started with a loose design and progressing through the two minute clip it’s easy to see that I largely stuck to concept but ended up changing some character placement and adding a ton of additional details and lighting effects as I moved through the work.
The two minute clip represents about four hours of work.