Alright, there are a lot of things I struggle with while working on Grassblades - my own peculiar semi-face blindness among them (I can remember individual features - noses, eyebrows, chins, etc., but can't remember how all of those bits fit together as a unit, so I have to "start over" each time I draw a character, assembling those features into their face. Drawing characters on model is really, really hard; don't have any problems recognising people, though) - but for 2016, I've decided what my main enemy is:
Architecture
I draw a lot of houses and buildings and shrines and whatnot in Grassblades, but a LOT of the time, I default to a whitewash-and-brown-wood-and-tiled-roofs standard. And this kind of holds true no matter WHAT comic I'm drawing; if you ask me to draw a house, you're going to get something that sure, looks like a house, but is pretty much just my version of the old classic two-windows-and-a-door model. There's very little personality, and a lot of the time, it looks stiff.
And let's be clear - I've been drawing a LOT of houses over the years, and even moreso now that I'm working on Grassblades. And while I've been getting better, my standard house is still very much a box with a lid on it.
So how to I (continue to) fight this adversary of mine?
Work from reference
Both photographs and bringing my sketchbook with me and "lifedrawing" houses. Interesting houses. Ugly houses. Small houses, large houses, weirdly-shaped houses. Even the standard box-with-a-lid houses, because I need to build up a visual library in my head of houses to choose from, so when someone says "house", I don't just think of my own mental symbol of a house, but actively start flipping through my library catalog.
Being patient
There are cityscapes in Grassblades. As in, sweeping camera shots panning over heaps of houses at once. There are close-in shots involving more rooftiles than you want to think about. There are shrines and temples. There are palaces and humble huts.
And right now, the main thing they have in common is that I run out of patience halfway through the inking and start getting sloppy. My background-lineart is often a lot more sloppy than my character-lineart - partly because in sketching, I thought "Hey wouldn't it be cool if this whole scene took place in a massive city full of crowds?", and partly because I get bored inking architecture. So my challenge is slowing down and taking the time I need for stuff like this, so that I don't rush through and do a bad job.
Find the joy in it
I love drawing people. I love coming up with costume designs and fun things for characters to do. But drawing architecture bores me, in large part because I get stuck drawing standard-box houses. So I need to work to find the same joy in it that I find in drawing characters. Part of this will be varying that base-model until it's no longer boring and standard, part of it will be about finding personality in the houses, and part of it will be just finding joy in the process of inking and colouring it all.
.
There are other things I want to improve - like drawing hands, or how to draw people from extreme camera angles, or how to pick a colour-scheme for a scene without flailing like a desparate octopus until I accidentally get it right - but I think architecture's going to be my big self-challenge for 2016.
ETA: It's entirely possible that I'll change my mind and pick something else in a minute, but this is what I feel like right now. Also, it might be worth expanding "architecture" to "architecture and environments in general".
