Weekly Update - 108 (Patreon)

Oh! In case you missed it, we got a piece of fan art from my wonderful friend Ashleyfox118 on Discord!  I put up a new Fan Art channel and posted it there, go check it out! https://discord.gg/HKZmH3U

Hoping to see more fan art, personally, it's amazing what I can learn from seeing my characters drawn in different styles!

So I spent my friday looking up references and trying something new with Kiva's hoodie.  It's always a little weird to redesign a character in the middle of a scene, but there's stylistic redesigns (like deciding to keep Riley's bizarre hair thing, indeed pushing it even further, rather than cutting it off or styling her hair differently) and redesigns in the interest of improving and making the art look better as a whole.  Hopefully this falls into the latter category.  Lemme know what you think!

And yes, the drawstrings are missing.  They were missing when Kiva found this hoodie.

Comic this week? Yes!

Drawing: Page 138, 139.  Finishing Lethe's character sheet, touch-ups for Volume 1, new website top bar, Volume 1 cover, (being honest, I probably won't get to ALL of this again this week, but the queue is growing)

Speaking of Volume 1:  Talking with my publisher the other day, we've decided that it makes more economical sense for the first book to be somewhere around 50-60 pages.  That would give us space for Chapters 1-3 for the first book.  I originally wanted book 1 to be the first 120 pages, 7 chapters, because I think that makes the most sense for a contained story from start to finish.  Larger books, however, tend to get exponentially more expensive to print (and they are heavier so they are more expensive to ship), which drives the price up disproportionally.  I dunno, maths and money is hard, I'm deferring to my publisher's expertise in this regard.  There's wisdom, I think, in keeping the book smaller and charging a modest price for it, as opposed to doubling the size of the book for more than double the cost.

Playing: Heavily, HEAVILY modded Rimworld.

Ramble:

I dunno, brain stuff.  I've felt kind of distracted of late, but I also kinda feel like I've been making good progress on upcoming story events and art practice.  Fridays never seem to really be working out for me any more for sketches.  They just aren't as free as they used to be.  It's not that I'm outrageously busy, it's moreso that on Fridays I'm either working on getting the Next Page to the state I want it to be in before the weekend or something else has come up that's distracting me from focusing on the work.  Sometimes I'm just too worn out and I want to veg with a video game come Friday.

I want to do more art, to squeeze as much in as physically possible, but I'm scared, I guess, to cross the threshold from fun hobby to an exercise in tedium.  There's been pages where I've felt burnt out and just sorta went through the motions to get those pages done, and it shows, it shows a lot.  I still enjoy drawing, and I could probably do more than I do in any given week, but I also very much want it to stay comfortably in the realm of things I WANT to do.  I want drawing to be my escapism, not the thing I need to escape from.

Maybe I'm just extra worn out today, idk.  We did help our friend move yesterday.  Plus we did the gym thing on Saturday, and we have more gym in about 40 minutes.  I haven't eaten very well today... And I have a headache, possibly from dehydration. Certainly the physical toll could be dragging my mood down today.  Ima go eat something.  And drink some water.  And then workout.  And then maybe take a nap.