idletry: june 2024 update

Hi again, everyone. I've finally finished the first draft of the script in earnest this time; it's been sent out to a few beta readers, but I am not going to wait 3 months to continue onward at this point. Maybe I will slow down for 3 months, but not stop entirely.
The document sent to the beta readers was over 1,000 pages in length, and the script itself clocked in at just under 200,000 words..

After some time, I'd like to edit the script a second time... In the second draft document, I have colors to highlight foreshadowing and thematically relevant details, two colors to represent the two main thematic cores of the story (which i call the "hate arc" and the "fate arc"), parts that made me laugh while rereading, my own favorite parts, issues with the text, and, arguably the most important part of second-drafting this: parts of the story that can potentially be removed altogether.

In addition to the script, I also now know that I'd like for the pages to be 7.5"x9.8" in terms of dimensions. I knew that more than anything else, I needed to know what size the pages would be, in order to thumbnail with the proper proportions. Even if things change in the story significantly, thumbnailing will start to give me a better picture of what the page count here is going to look like.

There are some other logistics I'd like to work out. This book will very likely need to be split into at least a part 1 and part 2. I would very much like to avoid this, because I want the story to be a single book, but I would not mutilate the story to achieve this effect. The first logistical issue is that selling two $30 books is much harder than selling one. Now you're talking $60 instead. It might be cheaper than that price, but two books are a bigger shipping cost than one as well. I am already expecting to print these at a loss... but if we are talking thousands of dollars in the negative, it would be easier to just go about printing a copy or two for myself and that's it.

For multiple reasons, I wanted to create a digital version of this comic. One of those reasons is to financially support the printed book side of this endeavor, because it doesn't really cost anything to distribute something digitally. Print and digital are very different beasts, and it's been difficult to try to transition. I still want to work at the resolution that I usually do. It's faster, it's more intuitive and enjoyable to me.
Great, I can pack that up into one big file and that's the digital version -- except that one of the biggest differences between working for digital distribution vs print is the resolution. So, for the digital version, this would be 2,250 pixels by 2,940 pixels. Working at a web resolution, it's 540 by 740 (which is honestly a bit too small for my liking). So, I would need to either distribute the digital version at a very large size shrunk down (sadly getting rid of the pixel look), or I need a way to size up the print version without it looking like garbage. So, the second logistical issue is figuring out whether print or digital gets prioritized, and in what ways, based on what's feasible and what I want.

Initially, I wanted Idletry to have a grungy line style with more black shading. I downloaded a bunch of brushes to Clip Studio to test them out a while ago, which I still have. A nice thing about that program is that it lets you turn off the anti-aliasing (blurring effect) on any brush, which makes many of them look pixely. I'm hoping now that I can find a brush which I can run over the sized up lines with, helping integrate the crunchier look into a respectable aesthetic for the story. The above panel of Shiloh is using one type of brush to go over most of the pixely parts of the lines.
It's still binary in nature, meaning that it would be very easy to alter colors with the fill bucket, which will be necessary for making them print-compliant. The third logistical issue, then, is that relining every page will take a significant amount of time. I figured if there were one day of my workweek dedicated to relining and proofing colors, basically treating the art for print, it might be doable. I haven't found a look I'm in love with, yet, and I need to get more comfortable with the process before I can guess how much more time it'll really take me. I also need to do some more print testing on a better printer; the one at home makes the panel look fine, but I don't trust it.

That panel was also treated to be CMYK-compliant, and the print test from this ridiculous printer gave colors accurate to what was on-screen, which is good. I downloaded Krita to assist with proofing for CMYK. It lets me soft-proof, just wholesale alter the color space of the image from RGB to CMYK, has an option to visually indicate out-of-gamut colors, and lets me use a color-picker that literally won't allow me to select colors outside of CMYK's range. The fourth logistical roadblock is that colors on a screen are inherently different from colors on a piece of paper. This one is... worrisome, but not too worrisome.

I have a lot of print questions that I won't be able to ask prospective printers until the comic is basically done (maximum page count, for example), and that is nerve-wracking. Although, even if I could not find anyone who is willing to print the comic, I would probably still make it. The subject matter of the comic means that A LOT of printing company options are off of the table, instantly. Still, there are people out there printing NSFW comics, so... There is probably a way to print them, lol. That is the fifth problem, but it won't be solved for a long time.

Anyway. I wanted to say that I've been working on things. Progress is being made. As for any other comic, I'm planning to post it here in advance, but I may only post entire scenes at a time, rather than page-by-page, or I may shut off comments on all but the last page of a scene (getting deja vu here), since Patreon allows that now. I know that feedback I get is almost unanimously positive, but even that influences my writing decisions...
I wanted to draw them out of order to prevent obvious style drift, but... even drawing the one test strip up there to figure out dimensions was difficult. It is from a scene in act 3. I ended up just drawing the beginning of that scene, although I wanted to draw something in the middle. Decisions I make DURING the comic-drawing process are easiest to keep track of when I'm working chronologically. I suppose I'd rather have style drift than huge continuity errors. It obviously also isn't conducive to posting as regular updates. It won't be on a schedule; the pages take as long as they take.

I think that's everything, though.