One of the first subjects broached at the Sketching Spotlight, as usual, was of routine. Carroll and Boulet were agreed that their routines were largely chaos, but that was okay as long as they hit their deadlines. They would do a lot of work through the last minute panic.
The bits of animation on Boulet's websites weren't necessarily planned, but he saw where he could put some so he did it. Since at lot of the artists at the panel show their work digitally, they have to think about how their work would look in print if they wanted to sell/distribute it. Carroll finds it very hard to use her work in print, since she utilises everything that a digital medium can give her, like scroll bars, clicks, hovering and gifs etc.
Carroll also uses a lot of thumbnails and layout planning in her script book. She looks at webcomics as being less of a financial investment, and didn't know how to get into print comics anyway. She uses traditional pencils/inks and then colors and edits digitally and she prefers penciling and inking manually and then switching to digital for colouring and editing.
Boulet said it was 'hard not to get eaten by the machine' when talking about digital art; a new tool makes him want to test all of the limits, especially Photoshop, although this could make his art a bit inconsistent rather than sticking to the same thing he has done for his projects. He also like water colours because they make it easier to be lazy - he can use water colours while he watches the TV.
Tarr commented that life drawing informed her work and actually made her cartoonier style much better. Corsetto agreed and said that one of her only regularly scheduled things as life drawing and that she enjoyed the shorter poses a lot more, since they are great for cartoonists. She doesn't like the 40 minute poses as much though - "what would you do for 40 minutes?" Corsetto's mentor always old her to think more and draw less. Tarr gets bored of rendering and also prefers much shorter poses.
Boulet commented that it was hard to give up control to an assistant or a collaborative partner; it was more interesting leaving them to do what they wanted, otherwise it ended up too close to his ideas so he re-did a lot of work in stick figures to give them more of an opportunity to do their own stuff. Carrol doesn't like giving negative feedback, so it is easier working on her own.
Carrol likes to use her dream journal as inspiration for comics which somehow meant she had less nightmares, and she also continues to work on her stories as she goes along rather having it all 100% to how it was planned.
Boulet finds it boring to ink over pencils - he would rather ink straight away, and improvise. He also commented that it was weird to achieve a dream that you wanted and hate it; he found it more fun to to sketchbooks and silly little comics, so he went into webcomics instead. His job was suddenly interesting again and he would get instant feedback which was much more fun and he left doing printed comics - "Now I'm happy and rich!"
Something that came up in this part of the panel was ages; Boulet is 39, Carrol is 33, Corsetto is 31 and Tarr is 27. All have been doing comics from around their 20s, mid 20s. Corsetto doesn't plan well - her characters aren't planned much before hand and he 'fans know more abut my characters than me'.
Boulet said that webcomics were expensive to do on his own website, but he ended up getting all of the site stuff done free from a fan after complaining about it on Twitter - this fan now does all of his programming/coding for him.
It was interesting to look at the different ways that these artists work and their reasons for choosing digital or traditional media. Webcomics would be an interesting thing to look into although they would require a lot of motivation.
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