I remain active with my work, working on art, editing webjunk, and doing what I do to the best of my skills! Here’s what I’ve been up to the past few days:
I’m making some new edits to this website. You’ll be seeing some rearranged pages. Links might crash or break, and you’ll see some placeholder art for where I want to put buttons.
Life’s been unpredictable for the past few weeks with doing extra hours at my day job, getting work done on Flawless Extraordinary Super Heroes, and Adam’s doing his own freelance stuff. I even took a short break away from art and the internet to reground myself and organize.
At the moment, I’m stuck on some things with Blackmask. I’m learning more workflows and thinking of a direction for making the background tile assets.
Right now, I’m learning new tips from pixel artists like MortMort, CupOhJoe and LumpyTouch when I can. I’ve also been trying out converting my art into pixels from 2D Will Never Die, It’s promising, but I’m not as happy with the current results.
My Twitch streaming schedule has also started to slip. Sometimes, I have a hard time getting into a headspace to entertain and draw for streams after work. I did one game stream to shake up my rut, but my machine isn’t good enough to play often. It might be a productive way to relax, but I don’t want to make my Twitch about gaming considering people followed me for my art.
Besides this, I’m staying a float, sporadically posting on my Twitter and Instagram. Most of my sketches I post there are environment concept sketches for Blackmask.
Sketching has taken a bit of a back seat more toward thumbnailing and writing game ideas down during my bus driving.
Despite having not much going on, I keep feeling a pressure on myself to do better than I currently am. I never feel confident that these sketches are interesting enough to post on my socials because they aren’t characters. I have a bad enough time thinking about social media as it is!
Progress on Blackmask presses on as I’m still making environments. It’s an uphill climb, but I can’t get discouraged.
For a short moment, I’ve been learning Pxyel Edit as it’s makes it easier to create repeatable tile sets. The program’s missing so many features that I ended up going back to learning more tricks in Aseprite.
Updates have certainly slowed, but honestly, not much news I can report besides livestreaming, my birthday and continuing to work hard on Blackmask.
I’ve made myself busy over the start of my new year and I already feel stressed out with all the stuff I put on my plate.
Currently, I’m video editing stuff from my art streams and game dev progress on Twitch, and I having trouble deciding out what to keep or dump. I’m doing what I can to not worry about doing a phenomenal job and just focusing on getting some clips made.
Along with this is some gift pixel art I made for my 100th follower on Twitch! Thank you and here’s to 100 more!
From my January 29th Twitch stream, I made a tutorial going through the basics of animation with a ball bounce! It might be rote, but it’s a good primer to get people to started just drawing objects multiple times and staying consistent with them. It went smoothly if you ask me, so I’m interested in doing more tutorials when I scrape up the time!
Most of my art time has gone to freelance and big book projects like Flawless Extra-Ordinary Super Heroes, so my sketchbook has been getting neglected. I’m trying not to let it burn me out since I am drawing “useful” art. But here’s art from the past few weeks that I have scanned.
I’m in this odd in-between feeling of having plenty of free time for personal projects but no free time because I’m taking on so many projects. I’m still not good at relaxing but old habits die hard.
My sketchbook priorities are going to the purpose of writing and rewriting the Blackmask story to a real plot. My programmer has plenty of character assets, so now I’m working harder at sketching environment assets.
I keep psyching myself out over how much this matters to me and I need to remember to ask for help and not take this insane stuff alone even if I think I’m bothering people about my obscure ideas that I struggle to explain.
Somehow, I’ve self-published and sold comics,yet I still feel like I’m stumbling when I’m trying to convey the overall direction I want to take Blackmask’s story. I’m sure I’ll figure out sooner or later, since the game will be edited and iterated on as it goes.
With the fruits of Adam’s labor reveals a new progress video for Blackmask!
This progress video done between the last video and now, includes new additions of Slopes, Dashing, NPCs, and Enemies. There’s some jank of course, but development still persists!
Continue readingI had plans, but they went to crap last year. With all the virus stuff, so many cancellations and changes in my life I didn’t get my goals done. The two freelance projects I had taken up most of my time for the year, but they kept me alive and maintained over 2020.
At the beginning of the year, I joined the Global Game Jam with Adam Mortell and made my first ever pixel artwork. Committing to learn pixel art, I plunked down $9 for Micheal Azzi’s E-Book, Pixel Logic – A Guide to Pixel Art.
From doing that, it lead to me starting to make a video game called Blackmask. I want 2021 will be the year Adam and I go full throttle on Blackmask! I want to have more update videos for the game on the development YouTube channel. Another goal is to make a Kickstarter campaign for Blackmask and get development going on it.
I reached 100 Followers and even got Affiliate on my Twitch Channel! To celebrate that and the New Year, I did a request pixel art stream for any viewers who commented. In the future, I’ll give it a year of streaming on Twitch while posting clips on YouTube Channel.
I finally finished my illustration for Furs of Fury! I think I was too precious with the work as I wanted to make this and give the game a good first impression. I think I’ll get the hang of it once I figure out more of a work flow for any future projects.
I’m still doing my sketchbook stuff and I want to do more to put more purpose to my sketch and concepting work.
I’m also going to talk a bit about some music and bands I’m listening to on Bandcamp. Currently, I’m listening to a Russian Sludge Metal band called Old Sea and Mother Serpent.
I can’t listen to a majority of my faves on my livestreams like Pink Floyd and Camel. My solution is to look through Bandcamp to find bands, genres, and musicians I’ve never heard of. I’m a big Prog Rock fan, enjoying ridiculously long songs and albums, so Doom and Progressive Metal seem like a nice transition from Prog Rock. If you like Sludge and Doom Metal, give Old Sea and Mother Serpent a listen.
For this year, I want to get more choosy about the freelance jobs, my clients, and commissions I take on. My other 2021 hopes are to get more prints of Pizza Man made and selling on my Etsy store! It’ll be a small run since I’ve been sitting on many copies of comics, so I want to get through them before printing more. There are a few conventions that’ll hopefully run, so I’m pushing to get more things like stickers and pins! My website needs a massive overhaul, such as my own online store to not depend on Etsy to sell my work.
Things are good. I’ve been doing holiday stuff, Etsy sales, video editing and new progress on my indie game!
My thanksgiving was well and my holidays are going alright. I cooked a nice dinner for my family and stuck together, caught up on some manga that I’d been missing out on like Dr. Stone and My Hero Academia and even purchased new games like Hollow Knight and The Wonderful 101 to get myself back into playing and thinking about video games.
I’m continuing my holiday sale on my Etsy store! Remember that it ends on December 18th, a week before Christmas! It’s the final week for my holiday sale! Stickers and Comics are great stocking stuffers!
Development for Blackmask is going to slow down as Adam and I are dealing with unrelated new day job stuff. I’m going to reduce these posts down to once a month due to how uneventful my life is going at the moment.
I recently became a Twitch Affiliate and close to getting 100 followers on Twitch, which is incredible and I need to do something to celebrate that. I’ll still be doing Twitch livestreams to work on art assets and concept art for gameplay ideas and Adam will still be plugging away at the game in his spare time away from his contract work.
We’re hoping to try and have a small playable demo around PAX East or so but if not we won’t rush it. If you want to keep up with new updates, we set up a Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube specifically for Blackmask and that’s where I’ll do the more development focused updates to separate it from my personal art accounts.
Continue readingThings are going well for me, despite being a slow art week in general. I’m still rolling along with my commissions and art stuff and Blackmask is going forward.
Adam is at the point in his programming stuff where I don’t need to hand him any new assets to make a demo for. He recently got a new job to pay the bills so progress will slow down on Blackmask slightly.
My own art priorities have moved to more design things, so I’ve been doodling logo and user interface ideas. I’m not as confident in my logo and lettering as I want but I have a passing knowledge of logo design thanks to Blambot explaining what goes into good logo design.
Of the sketches, I think I’m going with 4 or 5, preferring 5 the most out of them all for the more adventure fantasy theming I’m going for. From showing it around, people seem to be the most drawn to the last two sketches since they’re the clearest to read, though, I’m personally not a fan of the “Schoolhouse Rock” look of the last sketch.
Soon, we’re setting up our Blackmask stuff to have its own social accounts to post news related to the game on. Now if you want more Blackmask news, you can follow on Twitter and Instagram and soon an actual website!
If you missed out on last Saturday’s stream at Virtual HPL FanFest 2020, you can watch the recording on YouTube! Thanks again to Hammond Public Library for hosting me!
Doing this presentation has me interested to make a full article about making zines, so expect that in the future. I also need to get the print version of The Pizza Man done because I let it slip away.
Finally, I finished my stock of the original monochrome copies of Incident at the Game Store from my Etsy Store. Now the colored version of Incident at the Game Store will be the only version sold for the foreseeable future.