Rhea & Seiros, Rewards, Projects, General Update! (Patreon)

Hey guys, it's been a while! I've got a few things to talk about so let's get right to it~

1. I sent September rewards a few days ago. If you paid for that period (ie. you were charged around October) and haven't received a message, please let me know.

2. I'm way behind in rewards so I'm cancelling November term/rewards so I can catch up. Right now I'm working on October rewards (btw, female Byleth won the October poll so expect her in the October rewards!) . I'm hoping to finish the rewards this month so I can start December with a clean slate.

3. I gave up on the Rhea doujin. I'm really sorry. I know some of you guys are really looking forward to it but I just couldn't bring myself to work on it any longer. Comics/manga/sequential art in general is my weakness and it doesn't matter how much I love Rhea, paneling is a complete and utter nightmare for me. I just find cutting my story into panels and making dialogue shorter to fit panels a waste of time. Honestly I'd rather make a Visual Novel because that's how I write my stories. I think CGs instead of panels, if that makes sense. I also like having narration and that's usually not ideal in manga.

4. So Visual Novel doujinshi? Well maybe. See here's the thing, I became demotivated because I can't into manga/comics but that actually lead me to explore other stuff. In fact, I was inspired to try making Visual Novels again and so I tried painting some backgrounds (since they're not the most demanding things to draw for me) and here are the results

I also explored pixel art again and made this:

When I think about it, forcing myself to make a comic made me run away to find something more comfortable. I needed a different outlet for creativity that wasn't drawing sexy anime girls. Let's face it, these aren't the sexiest stuff and 99.99% of people who follow me for my art wouldn't expect this from me (some might even feel alienated). But man, I really really enjoyed working on these ^^ It's just fun to create stuff without necessarily thinking too hard about it.

5. I want to make a Visual Novel. I know what you're thinking. I just failed the doujin and now I'm hopping on to another project, hello burnout? And perhaps the reason I found the stuff above fun is because I was procrastinating on the doujin. That may very well be true. And I'm sure some of you guys remember that I started VN projects before and I ended up abandoning them eventually. Truth is I don't think this time will be different - I might very well abandon this new project too. But I just want to stop over thinking and just do it, maybe it will end up failing maybe not who really knows. And I think the key here is to not give myself a deadline and just treat it as a side project until I have something substantial to show. I mean drawing rewards already has me really busy so it's just not realistic to treat it as anything other than a side project lol.

Anyway that was what I've been up to lately and part of the reason why the September rewards got delayed. I guess you could call it a bit of soul-searching? One thing is for certain though, I'd still take drawing my favorite characters over painting random landscapes any day :P

So let's talk a little bit about the Rhea and Seiros drawing. Well it was actually inspired by this pic:

(for context it's from Fire Emblem: Heroes, that's me in the middle :P)

When I saw this I thought to myself "Wouldn't it be amazing if you could date both Rhea and Seiros at the same time?" and voila. I dropped everything to realize this divine vision and the OP illustration is the result lol ^^

(A side note, I made a bunch of new brushes for background painting so I had to find a way to use those in the illustration. You can see those brushes in action everywhere apart from the characters. Pretty happy with how they turned out! ^^)

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This post turned out to be more like a blog but I just felt the need to talk about these stuff. Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments (I might not reply soon because I will go to bed after posting this)

Thanks for all your support as always. Cheers!