Wisedocks

I Have Become Completely Sidetracked With Comics

Last week I started working on the icons and quickly realized that using Photopea was going to have its limits. I have been on the hunt for another drawing program for the last year or so and none have really sold me. From Libresprite to Inkscape to Photopea to Aseprite, and a few others that I can't even remember at the moment. A while back, I wiped my main computer and tried out Linux. I ended up not liking it, but I forgot to backup the driver for my pirated Photoshop CS6 that I had been using for the last 10 years.

Photopea is actually an amazing site that feels very familiar if you have used Photoshop before, but it also feels a bit dated. This week I came across Clip Studio Art. I'm currently on the free trial but am very confident that I will be buying the full version sometime this month. It has so many features and built-in assets, that I have largely forgot about coding this week and have just been learning this program.

I am clearly no artist, but have always enjoyed drawing. At this stage in my life, there is no reason to continue using that as an excuse. I'm going to draw and continue to do so regardless of how bad the outcome is. Redrawing the AI generated icons I had been using on FartDump has clearly awakened the artistic side of me that I have been trying to scratch while building these websites.

The Comics Idea Is Becoming It's Own Beast

A main feature of Clip Studio Art is its ability to facilitate comics. The built in frames and balloons are a game changer for me as I can focus on drawing. That's actually how I came across the program. I was attempting to draw a comic for FartDump which stemmed from an idea to use comics instead of my micro-blog and updates pages there. I thought I could combine the two into a comic and make the information more entertaining but let's be honest, people don't really care about the updates there nor the micro-blog. The two are more or less a record for me to keep track of things in a public way.

The comic idea is slowly morphing into a way of telling jokes for me. If I can actually make one that is funny, maybe they could perhaps become viral at some point which in turn could lead to a form of advertising for the site. I even built a simple backend to make it easy for me to upload new comics as I finish them. It is still a work in progress, but is fully functional.

Ditching AI generated images

Using AI generated images has become a lazy go-to for me, especially with featured images on my blogs. I aim to slowly replace them with custom images that I create.

I don't want my websites to look like AI slop and would much rather them look badly drawn. The badly drawn images at least are human made, and with AI taking over the internet, human made is slowly becoming harder to find.

The featured image at the top of this page is starting point for drawing characters. It is bad, like embarrassingly bad, but will serve as a starting point that I hope to look back on in a year or two and laugh at how bad I once was.