It’s February of 2025 and it’s high time I talk about my accomplishments and disappointments of 2024! Because I certainly didn’t dally writing this post over last December and January to cut out the negativity weighing down this post. No siree!
As usual, I drew plenty of art, tackled new projects and went to lots of art shows. Yet, I know I can do more of this coming year!
Conventions
The last few conventions have been decent but I feel I’m not doing my best. Coasting of the same books, stickers, means that anyone who’s a fan of me has likely already bought what they want from me from the start and anything else they can check my web store.
I prefer to sell last of the comic issues of my inventory so I can use that money to manage the growing printing prices for new items. With costs are increasing across the board, I’m taking a year off of doing shows to build up funding and art for new prints and books.
As with most convention stuff, the winter began slow, but things picked up in February with Capricon and Northwest Indiana Comic-Con. Unfortunately there were dry spells due to rejections and not keeping up with registering for new shows. Even so, things picked around the summer time as I was tackling Anime Magic, CAKE, Comicopolis, LodgeCon and more the those next few months!
The biggest highlight of my convention “career” is being able to speak and host panels with other creators talking about the life of making work without a publisher or outside gatekeeper. It’s not all sunshine and roses, so it’s a good few hours of meeting with artistic peers to shoulder each other weights to keep going. I recorded two more panels: Self-Publishing: Pros and Cons and Self Care for the Creative, on my YouTube Channel, so give them a watch!
Blackmask Development
Blackmask hasn’t progressed any further as I didn’t focus enough on a demo. I hoped 2024 would be the year Adam and I made real progress on a demo, but it wasn’t in the cards.
At the beginning of the year, I dived into Unity to learn it’s UI, hit walls that cause me to lose interest. I got busy with conventions and my day job, so I scraped up writing a story draft for Adam to test the Text Engine with.
I committed to a master draft where I’m sticking with the general plot beats and basic dialogue. I’m still not as confident in my writing but, I’m never gonna get better if I’m always hung up on what I suck at right now.
In terms of game play, the tough nut Adam had to crack over the year was the enemy path finding and behavior stuff. Enemies seemed to be get stuck in composite tiles, but Adam’s smashed through that. There’s still has his own day job stuff so he tackles Blackmask when they stop bugging him.
2024 was when I got my Nad Boss Sprites completed. Despite being a smaller sprite than Mongo the Bear Clubber, Nad is still an involved design.
Like with Devil May Cry and many Dark Souls bosses, Nad is a complex small boss with a large pool of moves you need to keep knowledge of to overcome him.
Outside of my own suggestions I have inspired by playing other games, I’m not as savvy as I like on boss design, but we’ll be sure to bounce this around outside heads for trusted feedback.
Streaming
I had a tighter run of weekly streams on Twitch compared to last year. As usual, art streaming is more important to me than gaming. It’s tough to make these streams exciting since I never know what to talk about while drawing.
I wanted to change up the streaming content, but I fell of playing Demon Turf and Balatro as the later is on my phone right now and the former didn’t feel good to play with my weak machine. For me, there’s more satisfaction from drawing than gaming so I’m not much of a game streamer.
Skipping the gaming, I used the regular streams to show my process making pixel art. On a positive note, I used to drawing and speaking on camera more I did the previous year.
There’s times I spend too much time being distracted “trying to be entertaining” and it takes away from my drawing process. I’ll give streaming another year before I drop out of it.
Until then, you can follow me on Twitch to see my weekly art streams. If you want me to do some other things or collab on a stream, I’m all ears.
Personal Pixel Art
A personal frustration about my current body of artwork is that I fell out of making pixel art. So for the middle of 2024, I made more pixel illustrations and animations to learn and improve my workflow.
To give myself more to draw, I made gift art pieces for select friends and mutuals who I like speaking with and seeing their artwork. I’d like to do more in the future as there’s plenty of folks I meet up with who have cool art to appreciate.
Trend hopping isn’t a thing with me, but I wanted to do a Princess Peach Re-sprite. They started with Peach, then spun into Toad, and the Mario Bros themselves. I started a Bowser piece, but I dropped out of it because they trend was already running it’s course.
I made this Cladia animation to try out an new pixel art app called Pixelorama. An app made with Lua, It’s both a web app and a desktop app that are both Pay What You Want programs. You can try it out for yourself if you are still shy about using heavier apps like Aseprite and Pro Motion.
Commissions
Doing all those gift art pixel drawings lead to more commissions that pushed my workflow to new heights. Despite these commissions taking longer than I planned to complete, I’d be lying to myself if I wasn’t proud of what I made. It’s a nice feeling to blow my clients minds with what I’m capable of!
The efforts to increase my pixel art output are better that 2023, but there’s still room to improve. Many of these projects exposed how unintuitive my workflow in Aseprite is. My snail-ass pace has to change because the standards are so high compared to many pixel artist capable to producing daily work.
I still have one more in my batch I received since September to finish, and after that I’m taking a a break. Should I do more pixel commissions, my rates will go up to match the appropriate quality I produce. If you want more news on my pixel commissions, keep and eye on my commissions pages or my social links for news.
Digital Artwork
Digital Art output hi a cliff due to taking on my pixel art and traditional art. Due to either burnout from sitting in front of a screen for many days or being stuck in my comfort zone of mini sketchbooks, I didn’t do a lot with digital art.
Despite this, I still took time to color older ink drawings when they catch my interest. I still feel self-conscious about my line art. I’m always fighting with myself on if it’s better to leave the drawing with flat colors or renderer the work more.
The touch thing I need to get over is blowing so much time second guessing my work and spending so much time reworking or sitting on illustrations. Stuff like this is why I keep posting WIPs instead of sticking with an illustration to push it to completion.
The scant few times I told myself to ignore quality and focus on output, my flips around between good reception and utter silence. I’ve yet to nail down a digital workflow that I can be happy with.
Still, the efforts I make staying with a drawing leads to good things. My Cole vs Nad Illustration go front page on Newgrounds so, I’m happy about that!
Finishing Up
As of writing this I feel alright. True, that I’m disappointed I didn’t get every tiny art task done in my life. But, I remember that it’s not the end of the world to stumble at the starting line.
I’m shooting to not be online all the time and seek out more things outside and in my community. In Illinois, there are free museum days for residents so I figured me and my friends would hang out and participate in the world.
2025 looks like a rough start with the current state of the world. The only thing I know, is I gotta stick with my best possible principals ask everyone I meet what I can do to meaningfully help out. As much as I want to check out, I got to lock in.