You thought I was going to forget to update the site this week, didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU!?

Me too. But I ‘membered.

I think this may be the last of the big catching up posts. About a year ago, when my Samsung tablet still had that new tablet smell, I was looking for the “perfect” drawing app to suit my needs (I’ve got several favorites, but the search will continue). I stumbled across the free app, Medibang Paint. It looked pretty robust, and it was free, but the interface was “weird”, so I set it aside and decided to focus on the Sketchbook Pro app. Fast forward to several months ago, and I found myself watching a YouTube tutorial or review of the Medibang Paint app. I hadn’t realized just how cool it actually was! It’s pretty much tailor made for making comics, there’s even a tool for breaking pages into panels, along with perspective grids and halftone layers. I immediately started playing with the app (now that I knew what all the tools were and what the app was capable of), dreaming of being able to make fun little comics on the side while I’m lounging on the couch, relaxing at night.

Of course, my first page had to involve PMD, expressing my inner thoughts.

I loved the perspective grids and the ease with which I could use them to create speedlines, among other things. I also quickly fell in love with using halftone layers. But, I also wanted to see how adding color would work…

I’m not sure which version I prefer…

This all lead to an idea for a side project, which I haven’t quite figured out what to do with yet. I may post it on the site, like IPMDT, I may hang on to and produce it as an actual comic. I’m just not sure. For now, I’m not even going to add it to the gallery, but I will post it here.

This first page was so much fun to see come together.

Yes, I did make use of the copy and paste function to speed up the process. That’s what its there for.

I started to get a little lost with all the halftone layers I ended up using on this page. I’m definitely going to have to employ an actual strategy for subsequent pages, way too easy to get carried away or just plain confused with that function.

There you have it, the first 3 pages of yet another project of mine: Inside Toby’s Brain. If you haven’t figured it out, it’s kind of supposed to focus on what my “real” world life is like in the studio, as opposed to IPMDT. There’s some fun stuff planned for the next several pages, but I’ve had too many other projects taking up my time recently. I’ll get back into this one soon, perhaps within the next week or two. Being able to work on comics on my tablet is a very exciting prospect, made even more exciting by the fact that I can easily import what I create into Photoshop, or the free desktop version of Medibang Paint. The tablet app has some rough edges and some things I don’t like (you can’t seem to organize projects or name files for saving, so every time I save a new, 20 digit  number name is generated. I have to periodically go through my backup storage and purge all but the current files, which is annoying and confusing, as well as time consuming), but overall, I think it opens up a whole world of possibilities for me. Stay tuned! And yes, this was indeed a perfect excuse to create a new blog header/logo…