Snapshot Sunday - October 22, and Halloween Character Vote Results! (Patreon)

Hey there Patrons!

Uff da, It's been a hell of a week for me (yet again), so we're here with an uncharacteristically late Snapshot update. Still dealing with my various struggles both in the art space and outside of it, but despite that, I got a decent amount of work done, though again not as much as I was hoping to get done.

Before we get too far into the update, let me go over how everything is going to be laid out:

• First, we'll do the art summary and general snapshot update like normal.
• After that, I'll go over the results of the Character Vote
• Lastly, I'm going to outline the plans for the rest of the month that I'll hopefully be able to finish and put in some final thoughts. We're nearing the end of the month after all, and I've gotta get those Halloween pics done!

The sections will be separated out with Bold titles in case you want to scroll to or skip certain sections!

The Art Summary/Snapshot Update

So this week was moderately productive despite ongoing struggles, overall stress being the biggest battle right now. Without getting too much into it, it's been affecting sleep and other aspects, but the damage to the sleep schedule is probably one of the more annoying side effects, because it just means that I either have less time in the day if I want to try and maintain my sleep schedule, or I just give in and work later. It's a lose lose for sure!

But anyways, onto the actual art! Two pieces were finished this week, commissions for AndeAlmighty of their big kobold girl Kingsley, and another for Glitch of their big beefy shark Izzy, who is one of my favorite shark characters! Kingsley was an absolute *blast* to draw, I've been a fan of AndeAlmighty's work for a while, she has such great characters and Kingsley is in my top five of all of their roster, (Though given how vocal I am about how much I love Kobolds, is that really a surprise?) so I was grinning the entire time getting to work on her. As a quick aside, I've noticed a lot of people coming to me to commission "their character but bigger" and to be honest, I'm absolutely here for it!

Similarly, I'm always happy to draw Izzy, and the fact that I've gotten to draw her so much lately is great. Honestly I can confidently say Izzy is in the top five shark characters for me without thinking about it. Where she'd land specifically in the top five I'd probably have to think a bit on, because there's a good amount of great sharks out there (a handful I've had the pleasure of drawing as well), but this big beefy goofball is always so much fun to draw. I had asked Glitch if he wanted Izzy nude or clothed, and when he said clothed, I immediately had the idea to do the Jaws themed shirt, because I'll never pass up an opportunity to make a shitty joke like that! I also like to think in this world that there's an overabundance of shark-themed workout attire, so a sports top that's also a Jaws reference would be not too unexpected. Though now I'm wondering exactly how a movie like Jaws would work in a furry world.

There's more commission work though. as I was able to get a number of thumbnail/initial sketches done for a piece for Aatarashi featuring their friend Duragon's macro latias hero Lorena! Unfortunately I wasn't able to get much further than that this week, but that'll be one that gets finished next week, and it'll be nice to have some more macro themed pieces finished!

The rest of the sketches were mostly just warmups for various days, kinda covering a bunch of different facets of things I want to work on, namely poses, more human face practice, and then more sketches of characters trying to settle on what a "default" body for some would be, in this case Vallory and Kiyoko. It's funny, I've drawn Vallory so many times without any hesitation, but I'm running into a situation where I lock up whenever I try and decide what her "normal" body would look like. Hopefully I'll be able to get something figured out on that end. Same with Kiyoko, I've been toying around with her dragon form for some time and I can't quite settle on what I want her normal body to be in that form. Weirdly her normal newt-hybrid form I've already got her normal form figured out right away.

In a somewhat related vein, I also sketched out some bustier-than-usual Onyx because I've been thinking about changing up their proportions a little as well, making the boobs bigger primarily, but I don't know if this is just a particular mood I've been in lately or if it's a more "permanent" (for what good that word means when most of my characters can use magic, haha) change. Either way, that'll do it for the snapshot update!

Halloween Character Vote Results

So! Real quickly, lets go over the results of the character vote. If you didn't participate, a real quick summary was there were two character groups, OCs and Fanart Characters, each had 16 options to chose from, and it was a ranked vote for each group.

For OCs, Onyx won by a pretty dominating margin, with half of the voters choosing Onyx as their first pick, and a third of the remaining voters choosing Onyx as their second pick. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Abby and Vallory had pretty strong showings in folk's preferences, but nowhere near as close as the support for Onyx!

For Fanart characters, the preferences of folks where overall much more evenly spread. No single character had a majority of primary support, so this one had to have the full Ranked Vote experience applied to it. Toriel and Renamon had some pretty strong support, whereas other characters I had provided as options, like Moxie and Isabelle, had a pretty weak showing. Though by far and away, there were two that had more support than everyone else. Susie, from Deltarune, and Loona, from Helluva Boss. Apparently y'all like mean girls! Loona just barely managed to win though, as she had a stronger show of secondary support than Susie (While both Loona and Susie were half of the voters first or second picks, Loona usually ranked higher than Susie among voters by a margin of at least 7 ranks when she was preferred, whereas Susie was usually only preferred by about 4 ranks when she was preferred).

So for the Halloween pics, I'm going to start with Onyx, which will be a Patreon Exclusive, and then Loona will be the fanart Pic, which I will probably release to the public! I might also do some additional sketches of Vallory and Susie if I have time, but they probably won't be taken to the same level as the other two pics (they might be colored sketches as most if I had to guess).

Which brings us to the last part, the plan for the rest of the month!

October Close-out Plans

Alright, so we're nearing the end of the month, obviously, and the main things I want to get done for the Patreon are the Halloween pics, but I also have a number of other things I want to get done to. I don't normally go into this kind of detail outlining my plans, so if this is something you'd like to see more often (like a monthly roadmap at the start of the month maybe?) let me know!

Obviously I have a pretty notable list of commissions still in progress, and while a lot of that is due to the whole Inking struggles, I want to get at least two more Riptide pieces fully completed at minimum, though I'd prefer to have three completed (or more if possible). I also want to wrap up the rest of the first batch of Sketch-tober commissions, which should be fairly easy given they're bypassing the inks and the time-sink that that's been lately.

I also want to have at least one character "intro/bio" picture, probably of Vallory or Onyx, that's more just a neutral pose pinup with some extra details that can sort-of be used as a reference. I'm unfortunately probably going to have to give-up on the idea of getting any actual Ref images done for my characters despite the initial theme of OC-tember, unless I absolutely kill myself and go nose to the grindstone for the rest of the month. 

And lastly, I want to wrap up a few more prominently outstanding project pieces. Notably, there are still a couple reward pictures from the Macro March growth drive that aren't finished, and while the majority of the work (framing, poses, initial sketch cleanup and such) is done, I still haven't actually *finished* them. I want to have those done before I even think about planning for a Grow-Vember drive, so those may take higher priority than other projects.

Thinking all that over, I'll probably not do as many warm-up sketches for the rest of the month and instead put that time into the projects listed above. I'll probably still have *some* warm-up sketches, but if I can, they'll be either tied directly to one of the projects above, or they'll be much smaller in scope than they usually are (as in, instead of a full page/canvas of facial practice, maybe it's only one or two or three faces). 

Alright, that's a mountain and a half of text. Hopefully you don't mind these longer posts, but if you'd like me to keep it more concise, or have posts like these broken up into multiple posts, let me know!

As always, thank you all so much for your support! I hope your weekend went well and was restful and relaxing for you, and I hope this next week is a good one for you! Until then!