This month's arm annoyance factors below! Again, keep in mind the right arm is nearly constantly at rest in the left arm in use. (Standard deviations in parentheses.)
L R
February 3.1 (1.4) 4.1 (1.8)
March 2.4 (0.9) 3.2 (1.3)
April 2.3 (0.9) 2.9 (1.0)
May 2.4 (0.9) 2.3 (0.9)
June 1.6 (0.6) 2.2 (0.8)
July 1.8 (0.9) 1.5 (0.7)
August 1.2 (0.6) 1.4 (0.7)
September 1.8 (0.8) 1.2 (0.6)
Right arm--some slight improvement again this month. That 1.0 barrier is going to be hard to pass because in order for me to assign 0 to a day it has to feel perfect. (1 is negligible, 2 is noticeable but not too bad, 3 and up are the ouch levels) Although if it stays around 1 when I start using it that would be no problem at all. (We're still not there yet--usage still causes irritation.) I'm still a bit hesitant to pass the 90 minute barrier so for October I will be bumping up the two 60 minute sessions to 90 minutes.
Also notable, the right arm does significantly better sketching and inking than with other steps of the drawing process. This is likely due to slower movements and not having to constantly select tools from menus during these steps. This will be something to focus on once it's ready to try longer sessions. We also should be good to go for the first right handed streams in a long time for this month's Halloween sketches.
Left arm--Oops! Had a bit of a setback this month. For the past several months I've been trying to pinpoint things that irritate it and make adjustments, particularly when working four days per week. I've made significant progress and thus have been able to increase the amount of drawing time with this arm, however it seems that this month mouse movement combined with increased drawing time caused a problem. The solution--cut out the mouse, of course! I've started using a small trackball that I can control with the thumb that has helped a lot, except I can only use it a couple hours per day before it starts giving my thumb problems and we don't want that, so it is mainly a light usage/after work thing. I'm currently looking into some other trackballs and track pads as ways to add variety to the way I control the cursor. In the meantime, the drawing gets scaled back a bit to make sure the arm does not get too irritated again.
At this point it's fairly obvious there is no way the left arm is going to get better while I'm using it in place of the right arm. That's okay so long as the right arm continues to improve. I'm just going to worry about keeping it at manageable levels, have fun and draw when it feels okay (on designated left-handed days), and relax when it needs rest.
I had originally thought that Crimson Flag would return to its weekly schedule once I completed building the 10 page buffer this month, however this jump is getting pushed back since I had to take a one week break. In addition to having a large buffer, the other half of the exercise was to make sure I could draw one page per week many weeks in a row before dedicating myself to this schedule once again. So, this counter gets reset! That's okay--I didn't quite expect to ramp up to this speed on the first try. I'm probably going to want to do at least eight or so pages in a row with no problem before I decide to return to a once per week schedule officially. The every other week schedule is a good place to be in for now since a comic at half speed is super easy to do and I don't feel miserable with the comic not updating at all. Plus this month I'm going to dedicate the Saturday and Sunday sessions for Halloween sketches and not worry about if I don't have the comic for the week done beforehand.
Extra Complex Fun Allotment Schedule:
Sunday - L unmonitored, as long as it feels okay
Monday - R 1.5h
Tuesday - L 2h (max)
Wednesday - odd day (draw with mouth instead)
Thursday - R 1.5h
Friday - L 2h (max)
Saturday - R 1.5h
