Update (Patreon)

Firstly, I hope you're all safe and healthy! Take care of yourselves (both physically and mentally) it's a very scary, uncertain time right now. If you'd like, please have a contact-free internet hug :)

*hugs*

Always Human physical preorder goodies:

I'm still not quite sure yet what size the bookmarks will be - I'm waiting on a few quotes from printing companies. So I'll sit on this wip until I know for sure. Hopefully while I'm waiting I"ll notice any anatomy/proportion errors~
(This is why I roughly filled in the flat colours - it'll help me notice errors while I wait.)

I have decided that while all the fonts I used in Always Human are great for a comic, they are not so good for text on a bookmark. Thinking I might use a more generic font as below :)

(the black border is to remind me of the space that might be taken up by the bleed area)


Postcard wip.

I'll probably do the bookmark colouring in the same painterly style as the book cover, but I wanted to do something different for the postcard. It's been forever and a day since I last aimed for a crayon/pastel/dry media look, so this has been fun :)

I've been using the DAUB dry media brushes, which are incredible.

Trying to only use print-friendly colours has not been fun, I love my bright reds and blues ; - ; I suspect I'm going to have to dull all the colours a bit, because at the shade Sunati's skin is right now, there are no print-friendly shades of reddish brown I can use to colour blush.


There's no real update on the bookplate stickers.

I think they'll probably be 9 x 6cm, and I've sadly acknowledged that silver foiling is out of my budget and not possible. I'm currently looking into getting them printed on silver or holographic paper which could also be very sparkly! But that may also be out of my budget, still waiting on quotes. If it is out of my budget, I'll just go for standard paper with gloss. I can still sign them in a silver pen which will be shiny and fun :)


Flower & Fangs update:

F&F went to the big editor pitching meeting and came back with a request for revisions.

The writing revisions request was excellent, actually. Working with editors is great! Remind me to talk about the changes in the future, after you've actually had a chance to read the comic :)

There was also a comment that the art is too loose and could cause confusion for readers.

While I love the looseness of the art so far, I do acknowledge that avoiding confusion for readers is vital.

I want to keep a certain looseness in the art because that's good for emotions, so I considered two ways of tightening up the art.

Option 1) Use thicker, varied lines to 'contain' the loose colouring, so the loose colouring doesn't cause confusion. Use white outline hightlights to separate out the foreground and the background.

Option 2) Keep the lines thin, but tighten them up, and tighten up the foreground colours a bit.

While I do prefer the lines more in option 1 (option 2 is bit stiff), I also think option 2 is much closer to what I want. In my opinion thin lines work much, much better with pastel colours. And I really want this comic to be pastelly.

Hopefully, with practice, I'll get better at making the lines feel less stiff. I've been doing these lines on vector layers, something that is very new to me, which might be contributing to the stiffness. So hopefully also as I learn more about vector layers, and how brushes behave on vector layers, I'll be able to get them to feel a bit more natural :)

(The backgrounds were partially hand-drawn on vector layers, partially 3D models. The nice thing about doing a modern story is that I can return to using lines extracted from 3D models and don't have to worry about actually drawing fiddly things like trains and cars :P)