My life is a busy one. This is my stress relief.

What's the point of this, anyhow?

It turns out that the questions "Why am I drawing a comic?" and "Why am I drawing this comic?" have very different answers. The first one is simpler (and the second one might not even be quantifiable), so I'm going to write about that for a little bit.

At its core, "Why am I drawing a comic?" has about the same answer as "Why am I writing a post right now?" I'm a very busy person, and I am (largely as a result of the first point) a very stressed person. Drawing and writing are things that let me take a little bit of time to myself during my days. It's soothing to have a fun project to come back to between all of the required ones.

I have ideas for stories, comics, RPGs, art projects, etc., all the time. Some of them I have the time and energy to work on... and some of them, I even finish. Most of them (sadly) never make it past the Idea stage. Starlass made it past that stage, and I'm pretty excited about that. I couldn't tell you exactly why Starlass made it, and so many others have not... but it probably has to do with my schedule this semester.

I'm busy. I have a pretty demanding course load this semester, and a job that is wonderful but nevertheless eats most of my free time right up. (Some times, like today, the job seems to eat up all of the time that I try to set aside for homework. Oops.) I'm pretty happy with my life... but I'm pretty stressed out by it, too.

Right now, drawing a comic seems to be the perfect stress relief. Not only do I enjoy drawing, but it's something that can exist in the cracks and shadows of my life. If I have half an hour free, I can pull up the latest page and work on it for a little while... and I feel like I'm doing something productive. I can't whip up a story (or even a decently interesting post) in half an hour, but I can get a little bit of drawing done. It helps me feel productive, even when I'm not moving very quickly... and for me, feeling productive is a huge stress-reliever. If I feel like I've accomplished something, I let myself relax a little more. It's important.

It's also really satisfying to be drawing something that builds on itself. Starlass doesn't flow smoothly from one page to the next, but the pages are definitely sequential in nature. The fact that Starlass is one project, instead of dozens of tiny individual drawings makes a big difference in how I feel about the time spent on it. Again, it relates to the feeling of accomplishment, and the idea that I'm doing something productive and worthwhile.

It's fun to be able to work on something big... and not to worry about it too much. There's no timetable for Starlass, no deadlines to meet, and no rules about making sure the main character looks the same from one page to another (because so far, she doesn't at all). It doesn't matter if I screw up on the layout or if the characters look a bit wonky, because the whole point of drawing this comic is to lower my stress level... not freak out because I haven't attained perfection.

It's pretty enjoyable.

(001) Awkwardly drawn hands

Her hands look to be in a very painful position, don't they? I was so preoccupied with trying to make the fingers look right that I forgot to make sure her wrists were bent at an angle that didn't induce screams of pain.

Oops.

Oh, well. It's happened before, and I don't doubt that it will happen again.

A lot of people say that hands are really hard to draw. They're not, exactly. They're comprised of lines and shapes and light and shadows, just like everything else. They're no harder to draw correctly than eyes, or knees, or noses or ears or hair. Thing is, hands are complicated.

I know that "they're not hard, they're complicated!" doesn't sound like much of an argument, but bear with me here, because it's absolutely true. Why? Because we simplify most of what we draw. Most things can be reduced pretty easily. Hair, eyes, and ears can all be simplified into something that takes only a brushstroke and a half—and they will still be recognisable. Hands, unfortunately, tend not to follow that pattern. There's only so far you can simplify a hand before it become unrecognisable—a blob, perhaps, or a couple of pen scratches gruesomely missing most fingers.

So while we simplify almost everything else into larger and simpler shapes, we still try to get details right in hands. The extra detail makes things a little awkward. Even making sure that your subject has the right number of fingers will probably mean that their hands are over twice as detailed as any other part of them.

So yeah. It gets a little awkward. And since hands are awkward to begin with, it's easy to attribute the awkwardness to the hands themselves... instead of the fact that your character's wrists are broken, or you accidently drew something completely backwards.

Yeah, that doesn't help much.