New laptop and lots of new project art! (Patreon)

I'm back and I can finally draw again! 

My original laptop was a Microsoft Surface Book 2. I love that it allowed me to draw directly on the screen with a stylus, making it much more portable, but as time went on I realized that I did not choose a strong enough graphics processor for my laptop. Most of my games would lag terribly, and Clip Studio Paint would lag too and even crash. Still, it lasted me a good 3 years. RIP

I was considering getting another Surface Book with a stronger graphics processor, but I've been thinking about streaming my art and from cursory research it didn't seem like any Surface Book would be capable of handling streaming. With my Surface Book 2, I couldn't stream anywhere except to friends on Discord - anywhere else resulted in endless buffering. Besides, using the same laptop for drawing and streaming would lead to some very unflattering camera angles 😆

So I decided to make the leap to a proper gaming laptop and I was recommended the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 by a friend. This did mean I lose the touch screen ability and I had to find another means of drawing. At first I considered the iPad Pro, as I've tried it before and for me it had the best pen-to-screen feel hands down. But the gaming laptop was already pretty pricy, and the iPad Pro is essentially the price of another laptop when I only really need it for drawing.

I decided to make the most of Best Buy's return policy and try out two screen tablets: Wacom One, and Huion Kamvas 13.

I have never felt so loaded in my life.

Getting to try out both side by side, they are pretty similar in terms of display. But I knew hands down I wanted to stick with Huion for one reason - the Wacom needs to be connected to the laptop through THREE ports including a power adapter in this year of our lord 2022. How is that still a thing?? The Huion only needs a USB-C, and it's cheaper too. I returned the Wacom almost immediately.

So my current setup is an ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 laptop with a Huion Kamvas 13 drawing tablet. It's not as portable as my previous laptop and I miss the touch screen, but it's been really nice being able to work in Clip Studio Paint without fear of crashing. With this vastly upgraded gear, I'm also hoping to stream some gamedev on Twitch, from coding to drawing art for the game. I'm told it might help build game hype! I just have to design a rudimentary Twitch layout now...

Anyways, now that I've finally finished tinkering with tech stuff, I've completed the new art for the ladies!

Based on the polls "Lady" seems to be a better title than "Miss" - "Madame" was also suggested and I am considering it as well. But right now, Madame [flavor] doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well for me.

I've written about my updates to these four ladies in a previous post. 

Coffee and Soda have pretty much stayed the same. I struggled with redesigning Milk a bit. I really wanted to give her milkmaid braids for the pun, but they weren't showing with the milkmaid cap at all. I ended choosing the cap over the braids for silhouette but I made her hat more accurate to the Dutch milkmaid cap, and then I redid her braids to give her a softer look. Since her new braids were similar to Jasmine's old braids, I switched Jasmine's hair to plain round buns. 

I'm still not 100% satisfied with these changes, but I also don't expect this art to be final final - just something nicer than the previous placeholder art.

Here is it for reference.

And the Madelines have been redrawn too! I was so attached to the original Madeline hairstyle that each flavor is going to have a classic Madeline with the original bob and a special Madeline with a more personalized touch. Either of these can show up randomly when a Madeline arrives at the cafe.

I'd like to include more types of Madelines that can spawn in the future, especially different body types, but this is a goal for the future. This also goes for new flavors - as much as I wanna design more characters and flavors, I think 8 flavors is a good stopping point for now until I figure out the rest of the game.