Weekly Update - 174 (Patreon)

Welp, I missed my deadline. But that's okay, since it was self-imposed anyway. >.<

It's July 3rd now. And I have only 3 pages left to fix. It's a total of 9 full panels that need to be redrawn entirely, 7 total faces, 2 mostly background panels. All of them are in-progress, and in various stages of completeness. Looking at maybe, 20 hours of work left, total. 3 really productive days.

What's slowed me down the most? It's because I decided I wanted to open the book with a proper introductory page, rather than just reusing the same old one I started the comic with way, way back in 2018. You can see it up there in the preview. It's not done yet, but it's coming along. I have more detail to add. Infinite more detail to add. I won't be satisfied until I have an impressive, epic, beautiful, setting-defining opening shot!

Of course, drawing an impressive, epic, beautiful, setting-defining, opening shot is... in a word... challenging for me. I am much more comfortable drawing characters, and my backgrounds have traditionally left a lot to be desired. I've learned some things, picked up some tricks, and I'm better at FAKING a background more now that I was five years ago, but it's still pretty challenging, and it's still very time-consuming for me.

I've tried using AI to generate me references I can use to improve my backgrounds, something I can borrow techniques from, or perhaps learn from. But I really don't like anything that AI comes up with. It's great at generating boring, generic-looking post-apocalyptic cities. It's absolutely terrible at generating anything that looks like Kuserra to me. And that's my biggest problem with AI-generated art. I'm better than it is at drawing the thing that I can see in my head. If I wanted Kuserra to be just a generic, boring, post-apocalyptic city, well... I wouldn't be writing a comic that takes place in it.

So that's what I'm doing. I'm drawing these panels by hand. And it's taking forever. But my work on Volume #1 WILL be done this week. I'm in "I will finish this if it kills me" mode. And it might. But that's fine. My ghost will keep drawing comics too.

Then next week my husband and I are leaving town for a week. He's got a work thing. I'm going with him. But the week after that? Comics. Back to a normal weekly-comic posting schedule. Woo! Just a few weeks before we can celebrate God Slayers' 5th anniversary!

I should draw something special for it. Maybe. Idk. Do you all want me to draw something special for the comic's fifth anniversary?

Thank you all for continuing to support these things I do. Thanks for reading, thanks for chatting with me on Discord, and thanks for just being you. I literally cannot thank you all enough. So thank you!