update/ TM Stuff- Cover sketch (Patreon)

Been a bit absent, but working very hard. Kickstarters, tutoring, building a website, finishing a side comic, maintenance work, indoors termite swarm, and bad health on my end... Then this weekend my boyfriend's father was in a car accident and broke his neck, so. Yeah. Real Life. Sometimes it feels like each month is more difficult than the last, haha, but gotta keep going.  Got an MI page going up tomorrow, then the tutorial/ worksheet for this month up soon after, then more Meek update, then one comic collection that I haven't shared here yet but you'll have free access to as thanks for putting up with my crap~

Anyways, this is one of the many things I've got to get done before my first KS ever launches on Thurs, this is sketch of the cover. Most of the time making this was spent thinking about compositions, took me about 2 weeks to figure it out. My philosophy for Meek chapter covers (and MI covers to some extent) is to make something that both encompasses the mood of the chapter and also shows what happens right before the opening scene. Here it's a morning scene, for example, with the spectre of Dagre casting a shadow on the peace. Here it's two little things traveling together, dwarfed by a somewhat perilous environment. Just a personal choice that I like because your reader gets both a summary and an indication of sequence at the same time.

A book cover is a bit different though, since the primary goal is not to just be attractive but has to sell a book that the reader doesn't know about yet necessarily (in addition to giving some hint to the content). I don't really like thinking about my work in terms of making it marketable (I do know how to do that since I worked in games, which is all about the eye candy); if I did I would probably focus more on her body, because that's sadly what attracts cheap attention. I don't want that lowest denominator audience to be attracted though. If I wanted to be more representative of the collection of a whole, maybe more of a collage of characters, like a movie poster does, but I also don't want this to look so overwhelming. I decided instead to keep it simple and to go with a modified/ active version of the original chapter 1 cover, which is relatively intimate. My gut tells me that the audience I very much want, which is unfulfilled YA readers and adults who think jungles/ salamanders / adventures are cool, will respond to this. The colors are probably going to be what winds up selling most of this though so haha gotta step up, as usual

Once the KS is done and I have time to breathe again I'll do a big rundown of all the stuff I learned so far. I'm familiar having to do a majority of the art for a thing myself (it was pretty much my job at Disney for the game I art directed) but I was sort of not prepared for how much nuance and planning is required. Also not really familiar with the whole professional self-promotion thing, which I'm learning a lot about via my PM Neeka. I had to make a press release T__T I didn't even know what that was until the night I had to make it, lol. Sorry I'm rambling, I'm very tired.

Well, back to work. Thanks again for sitting around waiting for me to put out content and thanks again for understanding. Also feel free to pray for me or whatever you have to do; going to the dr to find out if I have Big Bad Thing or not on the day after the KS goes live, hoping to break this bad news streak in Aug XU