Reinder Dijkhuis Does Art @reinderdijkhuis@mastodon.art

It is a crime that Linda Medley, creator of the amazing fantasy comic Castle Waiting, is housing-insecure and unable to get out of the hole she's in. Please consider supporting her Patreon. I do.
https://www.patreon.com/lindamedley/
#Patreon #Payitforward

I don't expect what I am offering this month will take me much closer to my goal. I'm doing it for the few people who are Patrons now and have waited six months for updates. But getting some more Patrons would be nice.
It is not beyond the realms of possibility that I have 1000 true fans lurking somewhere, but they're scattered across the world and across the net.

I have very mixed feelings about doing my Patreon. I'm very far from my first goal and I don't mind that much because I don't need the money to survive because I have a day job. However, reaching the first goal I set would make so many things possible, art-wise.

I still use that shading method as a base procedure, though I now also pay attention to color zones on the face and body. Which brings me to an even better thing tutorials could have advised me which is to keep going and adding stuff.
Unless I'm doing flat colors only, an extra hour of looking at things in detail and adding textures and tones will only improve it, even if it gets a bit messy. Real skin and fabrics are unbelievably messy.

The method for shading skin tones that I liked was one where both shades and highlights were desaturated versions of the base tone at low opacity.
Apparently, when doing that and eyeballing the results, I was replicating exactly the look I had gotten used to from shading with the dodge/burn tool. D'OH!
And nobody said "the reason why dodge/burn is bad is because if you use it, it will look like this, when if you do it differently, it'll look like THIS." Y'know, that would have been helpful.

Eventually, I found a tutorial that taught me a different way to do shading especially for skin tones. I won't say it was necessarily better, but it appealed to me more and the warnings against dodge/burn had gotten to me, belatedly.
Fast forward a few years. I'm working in a shared studio with a friend and ask for comment on the coloring.
"Maybe you should stop using dodge/burn for shading".
I'm like, what?

Saw a private toot about what tutorials and such do badly and it reminded me of another thing they do badly: explaining why something is bad.
When I started coloring digitally, I used the dodge/burn tools a LOT for shading. A common beginners' mistake and one that I still sometimes have to fix when doing remasters of old comics.
I saw a lot of tutorials telling me not to use the dodge/burn tools that way, but little in the way of explanation why.

Over on Chronicles of the Witch Queen, the "Kidnapped Princesses" storyline is almost done already. http://cotwq.thecomicseries.com/comics/187
Luckily we have a short story in which the Baron von Fieffelfalsfaffel goes to Aldebaran (!) and Courtly Manners 2 to follow it up, do we're good for another month of daily updates. #webcomics #fantasy #weird

Preparing files for the updated version of Courtly Manners 2 to put on my Patreon. I'm starting to like the fact that that whole comic looks a bit trashy TBH.

I wouldn't say I've got my old mojo back, but I am more productive than I have been in a while. One more week of vacation to go.

Thinking of setting some absurdly high Patreon goals as a challenge to both myself (to work harder to achieve them) and to my readership (to understand and contribute to my needs before I can go back to doing regular comic work).

Yesterday I tried to rewrite an old crossover story so that it wasn't a crossover anymore. I mentioned this to a friend and they told me I'd sent them a draft for that a few years ago.
I found the old draft, which I'd forgotten about entirely, and discovered that I had made mostly the same decisions the last time as to what to cut and what to keep as well. AND I got about five chapters in, so I don't know how I could have forgotten this.

https://daily.bandcamp.com/2018/06/25/happy-rhodes-artist-of-the-week/ Thorough write-up on bandcamp of Happy Rhodes, one of my favorite songwriters. Fans of Kate Bush in particular, take some time to read and explore.