Snapshot Sunday - October 15 (Patreon)

Hey there Patrons!

Before we get started, a reminder that voting is still open for which character's you'd like to see in the Halloween themed pictures! Check out this post to get your votes in! There's currently only two votes so far, and voting closes on Monday, so get your votes in now if you can!

Another week and another bit of progress. While this week had some good progress on inking pieces, namely the completion of Marjask's page and good progress on VioletNeon's Riptide piece, I'm still running into the struggle where inks are taking a lot longer than I'd like them to. I think I might have jumped the gun when I said that the brush was one of the more prominent contributors to why inks were taking so long last week, as I experienced the slowdown again when finishing Mar's piece despite using that same brush. I will say that it was still *faster* using that brush, but the pace this week was slower than last week's, which makes me think that there might be other forces at play that are the primary contributors to the slowdown. If I had to guess at this point, it might actually just me the mental state I've been wrangling with.

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned at this point that there's been a mix of stress and falling into a potential art slump that are contributing to the slowdowns, but as I was finishing Mar's piece and working on VioletNeon's, I was also noticing that there were other things that were subconsciously coming up again, like paying a lot of attention to smaller details than was really necessary, making sure lines were just right, etc. Speaking more broadly for a second, this is definitely something I've struggled with for a while, and while it hasn't always been a major inhibitor to getting things done in a timely manner, it definitely makes it harder when I do get into these slumps. I think part of it is just me holding myself to certain high levels of "quality and precision" for works, and those expectations might be too high given how they're affecting my timeline on a lot of these projects, and also given that most people (at least I think anyway) don't really care that much if things are super exact. Ultimately I think I need to figure out how to relax and not be as strict with my lines and just continue to work out getting out of this potential slump and into a less stressful state. I dunno, I'm rambling at this point. TL;DR is that progress on getting back into it continues, but there's still a lot of work to do.

To that point however, while a majority of the time spent doing art was on inks and more precise linework, I'm planning on doing more sketches and looser work this coming week, if for no other reason than there's more work to get done, and you can see how focusing on linework is impacting the amount I can deliver. So hopefully we'll have more to show next week.

Alright, all of that non-sense out of the way, let's get into the actual breakdown. Obviously the sketchpage/comic for Mar is completed, and despite everything said above, I'm very happy with how it came out. You've probably noticed a lot more comic-esque pieces in the works lately, and it's something that I've wanted to do for a long time, so I'm really excited to finally get to do that and build up that skill set. The riptide piece is also coming along quite nicely, again very happy with the progress and results so far, and hoping to have the piece completed by the end of next week.

From there we've got a handful of sketches, some are just warm-ups and others are more planning sketches. Starting at the top right, I was feeling in a short-stack mood and wanted to also work in some other practice (human faces, different styles, etc.), so I worked on a bit of all of them in the one sitting. Still using the anime crutch for human faces, but I'm pretty happy with how some of those sketches came out.

Next we've got a lot of sketches of Angel with radically different body types. The short version of why this is plays into her profession and her abilities. She's a professional escort/porn star, and since she can change her body with magic, she often "sculpts" herself to fit the need of the client or the theme of the porn shoot. She's settled on a few different "defaults", each of them being given a "flavor" name; Sweet, Savory, Spicy, Classic, and Lite. Sweet is her heavy/bbw form, Savory is her muscular form, Spicy is her curvy/hyper form, Classic is the closest thing she has to a "natural" form (it could be argued that she's changed her body so much that she forgot what her normal form is), and her "Lite" form is her "publicly appropriate" form, which is just another way of saying the form I'd use for her when she needs to be depicted as SFW. XD

That being said, I'm going to also settle on a character to work on ref material for for OC-tober this week, and honestly it's probably going to be one of the Mains. Vallory, Caliza, Brock or Brooke, Onyx, one of those! Or maybe more if I'm quick enough!

Anyway, the only thing I didn't touch on was the sketches on the bottom. Not much to talk about that, just working on some updated branding to use, want to have a banner that's better at catching folk's attention and giving them a taste of what to expect!

That'll do it for this week's update! As always, thank you all so much for your support, I hope your weekend is going well, and that this next week is a wonderful one for you!