Snapshot Sunday - March 3 (Patreon)

Hello Patrons, and happy Macro March! Or Muscle March if that's your thing! This week's snapshot is a big one (in a number of ways), so let's jump right in!

So first things first, this week was very productive in my opinion, with three finished pieces! Granted, two of those pieces were much less detailed than the other, but the fact that I have 3 pieces that aren't super rough or still in a very sketchy state is a huge plus for me. 

So by far the most noteworthy piece is Marjask's commission in my opinion. The theme was for their character to fuse with one belonging to AlterationArtist as I mentioned last week, and I'm quite happy with how the results came out! The two characters had a lot of aspects that I felt played well with each other, not least of which was the color schemes. Granted, it's hard to mess up a color scheme when one (Marjask) is basically just black and white, but with Hyperia being a likewise very analogous series of Reds and Yellows, it just so happened to make up my favorite combination of colors! The one major liberty I took was swapping Hyperia's yellow, which is usually portrayed as a matte color, with a more metallic gold. I *really* like how the lighting on it came out as well, if you'll allow me to toot my own horn for a second!

From there we have many MANY more muscular ladies, the two other completed pieces being pieces that could qualify as done for Fanart February, Cynder and Michiru! In actuality though, they were prompted by one of those "Suggest 6 characters" memes. I had seen one circling around on Twitter specifically asking for characters to beef up, and that's basically my bread and butter now, so I had to jump in on that. I got a lot of great suggestions, and had to pare it down to 6 for now as I've already got plenty of work on my plate, but these were too much fun to just keep to warmup sketches like I had initially planned, and I'll probably go back and do some extra ones as a bonus once these are done. That brings me to a point I wanted to make; part of the reason I was able to get more pieces done is simply because I took work that was initially warmup sketches to completion, and while I don't dislike having a ton of warmup sketches each week that will probably never be completed, I would like to at least take  more of them to completion than I have been historically. I'll expand on some short and long term plans towards the end of this post that'll go over that in a little more detail, but to get back to the art, all of the beefed up fanart characters were done as warmups to start, and I'll be taking all of them to at least the level of completion that Michiru and Cynder are.

Marjask's commission wasn't the only one worked on this week though, as there was additional progress made on VioletNeon's pic of Salem, and after a little back and forth on feedback, some minor changes were planned out and made for the composition and the final size, so Salem will be a great macro themed piece for Macro March, given that she's dwarfing mountains the size of Mt. Everest! I'm particularly excited to get to the coloring stage for this piece because there's a lot of glowing bits she has, and I LOVE working on glowing things, haha. But Salem isn't the only Macro sized Shark being worked on, as Rugal's piece had some progress made as well! While he was a macro to start in that pic, some feedback wanted everything else to be much bigger as well, and after an impromptu feedback session earlier today, we've got the current, truly *enormous* size for Rugal, who really is earning their role as an official brand ambassador of sorts for Riptide! And last for this week, but certainly not least, the next stage in Edogz350's Riptide Growth series with their Dork Sharks is underway, and this round Ripley gets to have their go at perhaps a bit too much Riptide Black! I'm excited to finally get to work on continuing their shenanigans, because those characters play off of each other so well. That said, I'm really looking forward to working on all of these sharks, partly because they're so big, but sharks in general are just really fun to draw, and these are no exception to that!

Alrighty, to really quickly wrap up, here's a quick overview of my plans for, at the very least, this next week, but possibly later into the month as well. I had mentioned I wanted to have more completed pieces each week, so to do that, I'm probably going to have less new warmup sketches, and warmup sketches that I do decide to draw will likely be worked on throughout the week to take them to a more polished state. That said, I still have a lot of projects underway that I need to finish, both commissions, and work for Patreon, so I'm only going to do warm-up sketches where they're needed (specifically if I don't have other work I can progress on from a non-warmed up state). I'm going to try and spend most, if not all, of my art time this week on getting the February Rewards finished (the pics of Onyx and Loona), working on commissions (preferably completing the ones I've been working on recently, but I might shift to working on some others that have been sitting for a little bit), and then any time spent working on Personal work will come at the lowest priority, which will include things like the rest of the Beefed up fanart characters.

One last thing to make note of before signing off, I'm still deciding what, if anything, I should do for Macro March this year. The last two years I held growth drives with pretty decent success, but given my current workload of owed work, I don't entirely feel comfortable doing another growth drive just yet. I'm going to see about reaching out to folks I still owe work to for their opinions on how they'd feel about me doing one before making any official announcements one way or another.

Alrighty, that'll do it for this week's update. Another super wordy one to be sure, but that's just how it goes I guess! As always, thank you all so much for your support! I hope you had a wonderful weekend, and that this week is a great one for you! Until next time!