Red's Report (Late AF March Edition) (Patreon)

Hey y'all, sorry this is so late getting out. Had a pretty crazy opening to April and it's taken me some time to catch up with everything.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but I lost my primary source of income at the end of last year. I was coasting for a bit but I recently began an initiative to look for more work. I've got a bit coming in from here thanks to you fine folks, but now I've also picked up a couple additional animation contracts. The last few weeks have been spent prioritizing that work, but now that things are settled I should be able to make some more progress on my personal stuff.

This time has not been a complete wash though. I would have liked to do more drawing (though I did do some, more on that in a sec), but I actually made pretty significant progress on the Samus animation.

The video here shows that I have almost all the UI elements present and functional. Obviously it's all placeholder and you'll probably spot a couple other bugs. But things are actually going pretty well on this project.

[Screenshot just for the heck of it]

Right so speaking of drawing, I have been making some progress on the latest poll illustration. I had hoped to get further before posting this update, which is one reason I was delaying, but eventually decided any update was better than no update. So, I'm still working on it, but I wanted to share what I've got so far.

Besides the income situation, there's a couple minor factors slowing me down as well. One: --and this might be apparent if you notice the layering issues present-- I am once again drawing this in preparation for animation. Another that I don't know if I'll ever get to do it, but it saves a lot of work in the future if I do. Two, and this is actually kind of a big deal in my opinion: I've dropped Photoshop in favor of CSP. I bought myself a copy near the end of last year and finally got the chance to try it out. While I have found that I actually like drawing in it quite a lot better, there's still some things to get used to, some of the tools work a bit differently, little stuff like that just gettin in the way a bit. Will definitely improve with more time in the software. And it's way better for animation, which I've found through one of my contracts, so you might start seeing some hand-drawn animation rather than the skeleton-based stuff I normally like to do.

Aaaaaaaanyway, I really appreciate you reading all this and sticking around, there's some pretty cool stuff cooking and I'm excited to share it with you.

I will be doing another sketch poll before finishing this one! I'll plan to send that out tomorrow, so I can start collecting votes and will hopefully be done with Peach and can jump right on the next one by the time the poll's over.

Thanks again for your support, I'll see you again (real) soon for April's report!

-Red