47ness

Still keeping busy...! I realized I didn't post anything in February at all (and just one piece in January), but a lot of stuff is in production. I've also been terribly sick for the past eight days 😷 just tons and tons of mucus/congestion every day + excruciatingly hard to fall asleep at night. I started on some prescriptions Friday so hopefully it'll done with sometime next week.

As far as new art goes, I downloaded Nightshade but I do all my work on an older gaming laptop so still waiting for some new RAM to arrive in the mail before I can give that a whirl. (I don't know if I need to say it, since it's been said everywhere, but I accept that AI image-generating can be a tool. I'm all for it being used to sample things in the public domain, or work that's so ubiquitous that it's plainly obvious where the source comes from, stuff like Darth Vader and Starry Night by Van Gogh.) I draw the line at sampling living artists and their specific works or styles, especially when it was done without consent. *shrug* If somehow I get in trouble for protecting my work with software, at least I said my piece on the matter.

SSnPP is still coming along (I swear ). I'm moving the debut of the finished first issue to probably May. My first convention will be Comic Con Revolution around that time. Still need to tidy up the script and decide what my color palette going forward will be.

Also! I'll be collaborating on a graphic novel with sweet-suzume throughout this year and the next. It's a entire story she wrote and I'll be bringing together visually. While I can't say too much just yet, I wanted to share some portrait studies I busted out over the past month:

You'll be seeing a lot more of them in the months to come (some perhaps much slower than others; you know how it goes with long-form comics... 😂)

Back again soon with new work~

Saw this making the rounds so decided to see where I landed. Middle square was indeed relevant to me working on SSnPP, both currently and in the past.

Lemme know how y'all scored on it...!

#webcomicwednesday

Time for another FF...!

Jamocha101

RoseyRoseyMae

ym-graphix

rabbitt-lord

silya-art

makkou4

SarahCulture

samsaturai

ElizavetaS

(ﾉ*･ω･)ﾉ

Well technically I've had this convo on-&-off again with KatMiLo BlankEye and a couple other creator friends with long-running projects. That anxiety of creating your own thing and worrying that it might not come out right. This set of ideas that's swelled and blossomed for years in your head, but feeling like it'll get lost in the execution. It's hard, especially during long production hours, of waving off those doubts and second-guesses. For me, by the 100th hour or so, I end up thinking about Sturgeon's Law, and how far deep I fall into that "90% of crap" territory. With how everything works these days, the so-called "attention economy" and fighting for every scrap of someone else's time, you either want to be rich, famous, or infamous. Being "just okay" is death... isn't it?

But it's been a fun journey unto itself. One of self-growth but also the social joy of putting one's work out there in the world. I especially enjoy having the opportunity to exhibit at live shows and the absolute delight strangers can have seeing your work, without the 24/7 social pressures of getting X number of likes and reblogs, or mulling over follower counts; just the simple one-on-one interactions really do it for me. The analytics can matter later.

That's just part of it, of course; just a raw ingredient to keep me cooking. So much of it is the desire to craft worlds, tell stories. Tell your truth, or tell an absolute yarn. Stir emotional reactions (even if it's just your own!). Putting your stamp upon the passage of things in a way that's wholly unique to you.

The conversations I had, then, were about being the thick of executing the idea while feeling like needing to hit every single note perfectly. But it is a skill that takes time and repeated tries to get better and better. And with each successive milestone, those nibbling doubts just become quieter and quieter until- voila- you've completely manifested the idea and now you're more than equipped for the next one!

Hey, if Sturgeon's Law is a thing, then I might as well charge forth for all I'm worth. Maybe someday I'm be on the other side looking back on that 90%.

This turned into a bit of a late-night ramble, but some somber self-reflection as well as I complete another trip around the sun.

"If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for what we really are."

-Capt. Jean-Luc Picard

I'm aiming for a 100-120 page story arc, maybe separated into four issues, depending on how sales go with the first issue. Super excited to share the first 16 pages, fully thumbnailed out!

This is basically a "cold open" (or "Issue Zero" in comic terminology) to Vol. 2, so it's fairly spoiler-free. But yeah! I'd been writing and re-writing this whole sequence for months (my biggest breakthrough came during an 18-hour plane ride back in March! ). As usual with me, I ended up getting more inspired by simply sketching it out vs. just typing away on the word processor.

Big picture, I've been able to tie a lot of the major story beats together pretty well; just a matter of refining the dialogue and some spot-research here n' there.

As for now, gonna see if I can't churn out this Issue Zero in time for my next show...!