Snapshot Sunday - September 24 (Patreon)

Hey there Patrons!

Hope you all had a wonderful week! This one has been a bit of a struggle for me, but I'll touch on that later, first, lets get into the art!

So as was the case last week, I'm continuing to have trouble with how long it's taking me to get my inks and polished linework done, and I honestly can't figure out why. I have some possible ideas as to why, but that's the primary reason why I only have the one picture finished this week. That being said, I'm very happy with how the end result came out! Razzy has a very fun design, not least of all due to the long voluminous hair she has (which you should all know by now that I'm very much a sucker for). Would love to draw her again sometime!

Moving on from there, we've got several other Riptide commissions that saw some progress, though not nearly as much progress as I would have liked. Still, some progress is better than no progress, and I'm hoping I can get both of them done by this week. Though with how long it's been taking to get my lineart done these days, I guess we'll see.

The only other non-warmup sketch piece (that's also actually a picture) to talk about this week is some a promo piece of Onyx I'm working on. This piece is going to be used as a sort of "redirect" image on social media sites (i.e. Twitter, etc.) that'll have a bit of text to go along with it letting folks know where else they can find me in the seemingly increasingly likely chance that certain sites go down. It is unfortunately a somewhat necessary project given that, as it currently stands, most of my follower base is through Twitter, so I need to be more proactive about giving people information on alternatives, because even if the site itself doesn't go down, user sentiment there is still looking for migration.

While it's not taking up a lot of space in this picture, you might also notice that there's a lot of sketches of new Logos down towards the bottom. I've been chipping away at brand redesign stuff for a while now, and while there's nothing "wrong" with the current watermark/logo I use, it's very generic feeling in my opinion, and never really had the vibe I wanted it to when I switched to the Onyx Pirate alias. I wanted something with a bit of sci-fi/tech/industrial vibe to it, and a lot of the work behind the scenes has been spent on figuring out secondary assets (fonts, colors, etc) to go with that feel, but I've been putting off re-doing the logo for a while because I couldn't figure out where to go with it. I found some unexpected inspiration in Starfield though, and instead of going the route of a traditional pirate flag like I had been trying for so long, I decided to explore more of a spacesuit badge/emblem aesthetic. Right away I was much happier with where the concepts were going, and I think I've settled on one that I'll be using moving forward. Humorously, some of them wound up looking more like video game kill-streak badges, but that's just part of the creative process I guess! Also as a quick aside, I like the Onyx wordmark as well, but I haven't fully decided on how or if I'm going to use that. That'll be a question for another day.

Lastly we've got all of the warmup sketches I did for the week! Admittedly there were some days where I knocked out a bunch of them in one sitting and others where only a single one was done that day. The sketches of Vallory going through growth/increasing arousal were all done in groups, and the pics of Kiyoko were single day pics. I had fun doing these, and would like to take a more in-depth pass at the Val pics at some point, but with my backlog as it is currently, I can't even begin to guess when that would be. Doing some character exploration for Kiyoko was fun too, especially figuring out what she'd default to for wardrobe behavior with the top sketch. I still need to do proper refs of her dragon form and her newt form (as do I need to do refs for all of my characters at this point), but having some extra character details is always fun regardless.

And that's all for the art! This next section is mostly just going to be a little retrospective/update/whatever you want to call it with regards to the point I mentioned at the start. There's no major updates or Patreon specific notices, so feel free to skip this if you want! But as I mentioned, this week was kinda rough for me, and it was because I was dealing with more bad headspaces again, along with stress coming from realizing and being unable to overcome my linework taking so long. To say that stress isn't a major contributor to the bad headspaces would be a lie, because the last thing I want to do is keep people waiting for art they're owed, yet here I am with a huge backlog of work. I've also mentioned on social media sites that I feel like I'm slipping into an art slump of sorts, and that I can't really fight against it no matter how hard I try. Perhaps that's also why these pieces are taking so much longer than I'd like. There's also the onset of seasonal depression, and while the depression I've been experiencing lately has more likely been a result of stress, there's definitely other things in life that are causing it as well. I dunno, getting too into that is kind of outside of the scope of these updates, so I'll summarize with "There's a lot going on right now, but I'm trying my best." Hopefully things turn around soon!

Alright, that's more than enough rambling for this week. Hopefully you all enjoy the art that I had to show! I'm going to try and have more done for next week, but in the mean time, thank you all so much for your support, as always! It means a lot to me, especially when I'm going through these slumps, that people like what I do enough to chip in a little bit to help keep things going. I hope you all have a great rest of your weekend, and that you have a wonderful week!