January Report (Patreon)

January

Hello and Happy February everyone! I hope this one isn't too long. 😅

Patron numbers always wiggles around depending on how busy/prolific I am but I should note that there’s a record high number of you here for the month of January
❣️

I want to send my sincerest thanks to all 1000+ of you that are here, supporting my work. 🎉🎉🥰🎉I’m awed and humbled.

⭐For all of you that are new to the patreon:
Welcome, I hope you enjoy your stay and feel a sense of pride in helping to make this possible. I’m serious, every one of these comics has happened because of this patreon and I’m super grateful for your contribution. 💗

That might sound ooey-gooey but while I may be the one holding the pencil, there’s a lot of community input that happens around here and I try to pay close attention to your comments.

Since many of you are new:

This monthly report is my way of putting on a suit🧑🏻‍💼, standing at the front of the conference room and telling you how things went📈 and where they’re going📈.

Thank you for your attention, let’s begin with the…

January Agenda❄️:

⏹️✔️  New Fanart + Fanart Poll
⏹️✔️ Physical Comics on Sale
⏹️ CYOA Update
✅✅ Libby & Holly Lineart and Color pg 10-18

SCORE: “3 out of 4” 😑

The only one of these that is absolutely checked is finishing Chapter 1 of Libby and Holly, which was not even what I’d planned for, I was hoping for completing the last 9 pages, not cleaning up the first 9 too! Physical comics is a checkmark that missed the box because it’s SO close. Like I’ll probably open it up tomorrow, I’m just getting some little things organized first. More on that later.

CYOA Update didn’t happen and the fanart poll…well I drew some Greeks, but that’s all I can say about that.

I’ll post a new suggestion box/poll to start afresh this month, though I will probably draw some more Greeks and also Storm from Xmen. 🙂 They’re a fun theme.

Anyways– let’s take a look at the past month and plans for this February.

⏹️✔️  New Fanart + Fanart Poll

I gave this a half check mark because there was some fun stuff happening and the Greek/Amazon stuff is technically still a fan art poll theme from November.

That said, I still didn’t put a poll up for new stuff, which I want to amend as quickly as possible.

Some of the Amazon/Greek stuff happened moreso in the sketchbook side of the patreon, especially as I’m exploring new subject matter. This is one of those:

This month I’ve been really interested in simpler, more stylized figures. I filled a couple of pages with just doodles of different types of cartoonish figures.

A little bit of that interest in cartoonish characters I’m exploring in Libby & Holly, which has been fun, but there’s still some of it happening in my sketchbook that I’m not sure what I’ll do with yet.



I’m rereading Dragon Ball right now in the Shonen Jump app and I feel like i don’t give enough credit to Toriyama for influencing the way I like to draw and what I find appealing in stylized characters.


These are some drawings I’m going to share for gold patrons that play with figuring out how to adapt those cute 5 head tall proportions from DragonBall to something more my own style, or influenced by more of the European pinup cartoonists that I love.

⏹️✔️ Physical Comics on Sale

I track the change of seasons by the way light enters my windows in my studio (just the upper room in my house). We’re at the exact point in the winter where at a specific moment every morning and late afternoon I’m blinded by the low angle of the sun. My cats love it, though.

I brought up my studio because my drawing desk is currently buried in the chaos that follows doing the product shoots and making sure the prints are coming out right.

I talked last month about the multi-step process that is getting comics ready for sale and came up with this short list:

✅Format Space Express Comics for Print. (The digital versions don’t have pages in multiples of 4 which is required for printing because of how pages work)

✅Updated “Laserjet” bellyband to wrap around comics.

✅New double-sided print to retire the double sided Link x Zelda one. ( I always thought of it as a temporary thing)

◾Print, staple, fold and trim comics!

✅Taken new product photos

✅Create new Gumroad listing.

Most of everything has happened except printing a big inventory of new comics, which is what I’m working on currently.

Formatting Space Express took some time but I was able to find excuses to use some old pinups I’ve never printed, like this one of Penny in a Masamune Shirow type technology predicament.

Because I added endsheets it shuffled the pages a bit and I had to add a new title page on Budding Out  that I think is cute ❤️

The new belly band design is working pretty well and it’s doubled as some general branding for the new store listing. I also just had fun designing a big wiggly, suggestive W for Winton. Ah, vanity.

I was coming up with a variety of designs for postcards (cropped because I’m trying to keep this post sfw). They’re not mirrored like the previous Link x Zelda one was but they’re still double sided and it’s given me a chance to print some recent artwork. I’ll post a better preview later.

I really try to be a professional about the product photography, but I am truly not a photographer so I merely did my best. First with natural light, which was just a little too moody to be good product photos.

Second time with two different studio-lighting setups. One didn’t work at all, the other was just fine, and that’s what I used. After some photoshopping the shadows a bit. The shoots took a frustrating amount of time, like two days. I hate throwing out work when it’s no good but at least it’s in the past.

The gumroad writeups are done now i just need to spend a day stapling, trimming and folding!
I made a spreadsheet to help me figure out how expensive each book will be to produce so i can better price them, which is a really nerdy way to approach things but I find if I do deeply nerdy things all at once it frees me up to worry less and focus on drawing instead.

As a funny and miserable aside I found out Little Bird’s Bath costs like 3x  as much as every other book to print because it uses up so much goddamn blue toner 😂 Turns out, books in black and white are very economical, who knew. 😜

⏹️ CYOA Update

It’s sad that this keeps getting sidetracked for me but unfortunately. Maybe I will have a better time of getting it running again this month once the store is live but I know it’s less important to me than Libby and Holly.

I hate abandoning projects because an unfinished thing is SO much less satisfying than even a poorly completed one. I had planned to have several floors to the tower but I think it might be wiser to just simply resolve the CYOA in maybe two more rounds just to put a cap on the idea so I can have only ONE comic project for a spell.

I hope this isn’t too much of a disappointment to anyone. My brain is half artist and half manager, and the bossman keeps saying you can do one thing well or many things poorly. I really care about the Libby & Holly story and I want to do a good job with it.

✅✅ Libby & Holly Lineart and Color pg 10-18

I think it shows with my output over the past month where my focus has been. Pages 10 through 18 got completed as well as cleaning up the previous pages and adding color to make the whole chapter a little more even.

I like how the style has been jumping around a little bit between cutesy and naturalism, and I even feel like I've loosen up a little bit with my line work.

Every project starts out seeming simple and getting more complicated as it goes. Thankfully with this one, expanding the color palette from one to three tones still keeps it mostly monochromatic which makes it easier for me to think about how to color the pages.

I'm glad that I decided to add halftone to my "palette" for this book. I like both the texture and softness that it adds. Especially when I want something to seem darker without being solid black.

My plans are fairly straightforward for February. Kinda more of the same, since what’s happening I think is a good thing. I love the momentum I have Holly & Libby and I want to keep that going. I’m setting my sights on 4 pages of the next chapter, but I’ll do more if I can.

🌹FEBRUARY AGENDA🌹

⏹️🔪Physical Comics For Sale🗡️
⏹️ LIbby & Holly Chapter 1 Cover + Gumroad Release
⏹️ Libby & Holly Chapter 2 Pgs. 1-4
⏹️ CYOA conclusion
⏹️ Fanart/Theme Poll

Thank you for reading this far if you have, and thank you for being a patron! 💖

Winton. 🖤