My very first OFFICIAL comic page for Aww, Feathers! And man, was it hard! 😆 I remember staying up late and working on this one up to the eleventh hour. I wanted it done far enough in advance that I could release the entire first chapter at the rate of one page per day, and then begin my regular weekly schedule.

As evidenced by the copious amount of 3D models I imported to use for reference, I may have overworked this one. Again, CLIP Studio’s 3D models are very useful for figuring out tricky poses and proportions, etc. But because they need to be individually positioned and sometimes individually posed, it’s time consuming just to set them up.

But then again, even as I write this, I’m realizing that it may have helped me more than I realized at the time. These days I understand much better the importance of drawing from a reference. At the time I drew this page I knew references could be helpful, but wasn’t aware of just how crucial they are. Without them, I may have floundered on this first page and not had as strong a start as I wanted. After getting the hang of the comic creation and upload process, I didn’t keep up the habit of drawing from a reference, in part because of how time-consuming it is to set up the 3D models. But they served me well at the time, and now I use references much more diligently, though usually in the form of photographs.