September Report (Patreon)

Hello everyone and happy October🎃
First let me begin by saying thank you all for the kind messages of sympathy last week. 💖 It was very healing to take some time to reflect last week and I’m so grateful for that. The anticipation of saying goodbye to a beloved pet is almost worse than the actual process, so September was pretty difficult all the way through. Grief is sharp and deep, but I’m starting to feel a sense of peace now. 🌥️

There's no segue sentence here, haha. things really didn’t go to plan, but let's review anyways.

🌺September Agenda🌺
⏹️✔️ Fanart + Theme Poll
⏹️✔️ Libby & Holly Ch3 Pages 1-6
⏹️ CYOA Pt. 9

September started off with a bunch of ⏹️✔️ Zelda Fanart + Poll suggestions
After getting some Zelda drawings out of my system and gathering wonderful suggestions from you all on the next poll.

It feels like everyone I know is playing BG3, but since I only just finished TotK last week, I was still very much in the mood to draw Zelda stuff. I’m very slow at most games and don’t consume a ton of media anyways.

Manga influence has really infected my brain over the past month also, since I was able to get some physical copies of these manga I’d read a long time ago.

It’s partially the crisp line style and screentone look, but also just the overall cuteness. Even the books themselves are small and cute.

It translated very naturally into me starting on...

⏹️✔️ Libby & Holly Chapter 3. I rate myself as a partial completion on this because I got 4 of 6 of the pages I wanted to get to.

Early on in the month I did a bunch of rough thumbnails before moving into the pages I wanted to finish.

I’ll be going back in with color as I make more progress overall, but I’m not hating just b/w at all. It's the manga thing all over again. Especially with the yellowish paper tone, it feels like ancient newsprint paper already :)

I roughed out all the way up to page 8, further than I had planned on putting out for the month. I'm also planning out dialog in advance a little better this time so that I can account for speech bubbles better.

Speaking of sketchy things-- my sketchbook posts for Gold Patrons have kinda been kinda focused on cartoony proportions lately. This might be just because of how much I've been looking at manga.

You could say the main theme of my sketchbook explorations right now is just how to make simpler things. Either in shapes or technique, I'm trying to translate some of the styles I like drawing in to be something animation-friendly.

I even revisited some old characters like Poppy :)

Because I couldn't really work at all last week, I made my update post midweek letting you all know I'd be missing my goals. A bit later in the week. When I just really needed something to occupy my mind much later in the week I got into some housekeeping tasks.

My buddy HavocTurbo and I had been collaborating on making an animated loop out of the Bombchu Bowling Girl for a while and the only thing I needed to do was composite his animation with my background so I spent some time on Saturday fussing with that and now it's done!

I hope to be able to rope him into collaborating with me on a lot more stuff in the future because we have a lot of similar sensibilities when it comes to art and stories we like. Here’s his socials:

https://twitter.com/havocturbo

https://bsky.app/profile/havocturbo.bskysocial

⏹️ CYOA Pt. 9 was definitely not going to happen last week. Writing takes a lot of mental energy for me and my brain's just been mush. I’ll make a priority of it this month, but it probably won’t happen until a couple weeks in when I’m able to focus better.

So let's talk about the 🎃October Agenda🎃

⏹️ Libby & Holly Ch3 Pages 5-11
⏹️ Fanart + New Suggestions/Poll?
⏹️ CYOA Pt. 9

I’m going to start this month just doing fanart and Libby & Holly pages I already sketched. It’ll help a lot just to roll last month’s goals into this month’s and just call it a reset month. Then I'll move into the more focus-intensive stuff.

Thank you all for the wonderful support and kind words. I’m looking forward to October as a quieter month, overall.

🧡Winton