Month of Spooks is Almost Here!
Only a few days now until October is here! I went biking to the library yesterday to drop off and pick up some books, and on my way back home I actually saw the person responsible for setting up the most extravagant Halloween set up of the whole city. This man goes ALL out for the past 20 years. He looked so haggard, but I wanted to tell him that I admire his work! I just continued riding past...
Moral of the story: JUST DO IT or regret it later. xD;
*Transitions to talk about art-related updates*
So I took a sharp turn in my "making bank" goal. I wanted to make four (4) adoptables and draw characters from games I played. I made two (2) adoptables, but no one seems interested...wa-waaa. They even got rejected from an adoptable deviantart group. Apparently there is an unspoken rule of which I am unaware? Anyway, I tried that, and I recently became inspired to spread my name at an actual arts and craft / farmer's market festival after attending one near my town. Some vendors I had seen from comic con I attended earlier in the month! I even saw a little boy selling bandanas for dogs. Guys. If a little boy can have a booth and start his enterprise, I can set up a booth for my own enterprise too. :U
I started off making business cards:
They arrive tomorrow. Hopefully they aren't trash since I've been seeing mixed reviews. The cards were either given five stars or 1 star. There was barely anything in between. .-. I chose characters I was drawing a bit frequently. I always enjoy seeing the diversity in color and strong female leads. I'm proud of myself haha.
This was also the first piece I really used a greyscale layer. Of course I placed in the color flats first and then did the grey scale. I think it turned out pretty well! I just did the characters. The actual card graphics was provided by Officedepot.
Next on the list was to make more content! Sure I can pull things off my instagram page, but I had stickers on my mind for a while. I received sticker paper, and I finished my current sticker designs:
The joke was to draw characters in Kyrie's outfit. Kyrie is the brown-haired demon with wings. The characters were arbitrary, but I love how they turned out! They definitely look sticker ready! Again I did the technique where I placed values after determining the flat colors. After finagling with lightness issues with Vyuvste (the fairy) and Kyrie's skin color, I tried just doing the value of Princess Paeosfu and Wrath's skin tone as a base. That worked out much better and their skin color wasn't lost! I might do a process video to show what I mean in the future. x]
Now I know some people may not care about characters or fanart, so I scanned in some of my more traditional art pieces in hopes to place them on cards or sell as small prints. For example, I scanned in one of my favorite paintings:
I'm happy the scan turned out great! Unfortunately I have bigger pieces, and I may have to take those to the library since the library has a bigger scanner. Can you imagine this on a thank you card? :3
I'm super excited. I just have to invest in prints, keep the receipts, and get myself a table! I hope all works out, and I can spread my name out more. I might even make an email list! AAAAA I'm so hyped!
So even though I didn't quite fulfill that "making bank" requirements for this month, I feel like I'm making progress to receive some dollar bills. x3
That was perhaps the only goal I managed to "fulfill" due to my schedule. I'm going to shift all of those goals to October.
As a reminder:
I’m going to do “skill-up weekends” where I spend two (2) hours over the weekend working on honing a new technique or trying something different than my usual digital shenanigans. My goal is to have completed works by the end of the two (2) hours. They don’t have to be grandiose. These are simply exercises.
Feel free to participate in “skill-up weekends” with me!
Week one: lineless art
Week two: texture – nature, skin, clothing, etc.
Week three: modeling in blender
Week four: human anatomy studies
My next goal involves the character sheets of The Dark Rose.
Work on Elliot Roseberry’s character sheets (nine (9) expressions, four(4) poses).
Complete Ninsen Herman’s turnaround sheet and possible color study.
Complete Galsina’s turnaround sheet and possible color study.
I’d like to complete the animatic as well, but I believe the voices of the characters will come to me once I visualize what they look like and I explore them more through character development.
To continue on the stream goal, I want to create new title cards starring my original characters! These can be resized to be posters, and I really want to add more original work to my redbubble store!
I am going to remake the following title cards:
Offline – it’s currently similar to my starting card. I currently have this drafted. I just need to scan it in. It’ll probably be the first one to be completed.
Be right back – This is currently drafted. I need to work on it a bit more, however.
End card – No work has been done for this other than assigning the characters who will appear. They may actually change since the chemistry between the current characters is nonexistent.
I may or may not add a technical difficulty or scene change card. It depends on how much time I have.
And then of course I am aiming to bring back Princess Flux: Journeys of the Abstract Princess by October 8, 2018 at the latest! I finished coloring one page, halfway coloring the second, and I have the sketch between scene changes. I have to redraw a few panels for the next scene because I misinterpreted my own writing. xD
Speaking of writing, I had rewritten the first chapter of the story to incorporate the changes I had made in the comic. I also discovered it helps to have a visual of the character. One of the problems of the original versions was I wrote the chapter for me and not with an audience in mind. I had a visual of the characters, but I gave no hints to the audience. I changed that. I also incorporated some of the Tayan language into the text. Learning from those revisions, I'm moving forward with the next chapters to make hopefully new mistakes that I can catch early on. It helps that I wrote out the entire outline of the first book, so that I can avoid plot holes and have plot consistency. I already caught a problem with the plot rereading the first chapter.
So if you are interested in the first chapter, you may read it for free here: http://www.writerscafe.org/writing/OperationUGAWTS/1944277/
It'll be a sneak preview of the comic! I'm working on chapter two, and that will hopefully be done by the end of October. The first quarter is almost polished to the point where I can start breaking it down for comic pages, but the whole chapter probably won't be published to my Patreon until the end of next month. :)
I'm thinking of printing a few pages of the comic for people to preview at the fair along with the first chapter. The first chapter is only five regular pages. Should I make it a booklet? hm.
In other art related news, I have a few work in progress pieces.
One is an art trade I'm so stoked about:
Another is another fan art piece:
I also have the Timoti and panda picture waiting for touch ups.
So does that mean I'll do anything for spooky October? Mmmm maybe? I'm probably not going to be doing much of the October challenges. I might do one or two, but as you could tell, I have quite a bit on my plate already. In a perfect world I would, but in the end, life had more exciting things to throw my way. xD
For the skill up weekends I may incorporate the week's topics into one drawing, but those were only meant to be two hour exercises. Don't expect me to get too crazy with them. haha I am looking forward to other people's entries!
And that's it for now! Hopefully I have stickers of my characters in my hot little hands soon and more progress on my WIP pieces! They won't be done by next week, but there will be progress! I am so ready to animate too. I must be patient though!
Have a wonderful weekend!
Já ne!
