#9 For Your King milestone write-up (Patreon)

For those who've been following my saga, I decided to try a new animation program Cacani to maybe speed up my animation process. I tried it out for two days, and decided I hated the program and don't want to use it anymore, mainly because A) it's buggy and B) drawing with the program is a pain. It handles vector curves in a weird way, such that if you switch its curve handle mode, it completely changes the entire curve, rendering all your previous delicate linework useless. There are a bunch of other smaller things, such as seemingly no way to connect the ends of two strokes, the awkward way that it splits the bezier handles, etc...

Ultimately I decided to invest myself in getting more proficient and being more clever with Clip Studio. This involved learning the ins and outs of utilizing light tables, using circles to outline the animation frames instead of sketches (which saves a HUGE amount of time, and is very copy-pastable). I eventually resorted to my value map technique for painting the frames. Before, without light tables, painting animations this way was fucking miserable. Now, with light tables, it's pretty enjoyable, and not quite as repetitive as it would seem.

With the animation done, and armed with a bunch of more YouTube knowledge on how to do color grading in DaVinci Resolve, I was able to decorate what you now see before you. Though the result is a bit heavier than what I had in my mind, I find the result very encouraging. The color-grading techniques allowed me to get close to an aesthetic feeling I've had in my head for a long time, but could never quite manifest into my paintings. I would never have come up with some of these techniques if I hadn't branched out into video editing, so there's a huge benefit to trying out new things.

The background, while pretty in it's own right, is the sore point of the drawing, mainly because my laziness in the initial drawing manifested itself later on by making it very difficult to color-grade.

I've decided to redo the painting process because after this try, I've learned a lot of new things and want to try out several new techniques, particularly for marrying Clip Studio and DaVinci Resolve. 

I also still some unfinished business with saber (such as making her cum, among other things...)

If you guys take a look at my earlier animation works, and compare it to this first rendering of #9, I hope I'm not the only one who sees a massive improvement in quality and depth.

Meanwhile, I'm making plans for #10 and #11, which I've discussed in the comments in previous posts.