April is a better month with new conventions. There’s plenty of prep work to do for the next cons. I’m sketching and working on new things.
Continue readingCategory Archives: Conventions
College of DuPage Con XXV
This Friday, April 8th -10th, I’ll be tabling at CODCON XXV!
The Artists and Authors Alley will be located in the lobby outside the Student Services Center 1200! Stop by if you’re a DuPage County local!
March Meh-ness
The month of March has been mild. The most I can say is that I celebrated my birthday and trudged forward on small art projects.
As of the 3rd of March, I turned 30 years old, and I’m trying not to get crushed by the anxiety of aging. I covered it up by having dinner with my family and buying myself an iPad and Procreate! Now, I can draw on the go! I’m writing an article about my time with Procreate at a later date.
Conventions
On April 8th, I’ll be at the College of DuPage Convention answering questions and selling art! There, I’ll be selling the finally printed Pizza Man book! So if you’re in the Northern Illinois area, stop by and grab a copy with my stickers as well!
The week after, I’ll be at the Schaumburg Library Convention on April 16th.
More Events
I have a big thing planned in the summer later this year! I’m preparing some of my art for something I’ve never done, before. So, I’ll keep you in the know once everything is arranged!
Writing Blackmask
Most of my art time has been occupied with writing Blackmask as a story. My focus is split between re-editing existing ideas for the demo story and the big narrative of the entire game.
My personal hope for Blackmask’s main quest is that players can choose a level toplayin any order they want, Mega Man style. A connected Metroidvania-style world or an Open World is tougher to design without ballooning the scope even more.
My programmers and I check in on each other in our messages. We’re both doing our best to keep going during our bigger commitments. Adam’s tackling enemy AI next, as there’s not much left to do with Cole’s abilities for now.
Other News
I’ve been doing tiny website tasks to streamline my websites stuff. The Art Page now has all my art on it instead of having separate pages for each category of art I make. If it ends up making loading issues a pain, I change it back, but right now I want my archive front and center
There’s more blog articles in my back burner that I want to finish up, such as my tutorial series on making Incident at the Game Store. There are other articles that I want to write when I make the time.
I’m struggling to keep my focus on one specific art task. I keep dipping so much into different shit that I can’t choose an art direction for myself. My schedule is a loose cloud of “what is currently unfinished that I could finish now?” on my project list.
It doesn’t help that I keep falling into that trap of posting on my socials to say I’m alive on them. My game stuff is in my programmer’s hands. I’m messing about, sketching, and procrastinating on writing a game story. Am I busy or making up meaningless tasks for myself? I need to improve my personal project management skills.
The Real Beginning of the Art Year
Things have been picking up for February! I’ve been starting up the con season, doing commissions, and more art! If you want to keep up with my tasks in real time you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram! I’m also cultivating my new Ko-Fi page for tips, so stop by there as well!
Most of Early February was preparing for Northwest Indiana Comic-Con, the first con I’ve had in years due to the plague. It’s nice to resupply and get ready. I’ve been taking on extra hours at my day job to get more money to print and reprint missing things. Luckily, NWI Comic-Con was better than I worried about! My Cat Stickers are a smash hit, they sold even more than my comics!
My stickers have grown with my newest addition to my growing collection of stickers!
Thanks to StickerNinja, you can get a large 5×4 size of my Hipster Medusa stickers!
While there, I took one nice marker commission of a Tracksuit Mafia guy from the Hawkeye show and comics.
His comic-inspired colors were simple enough, though I was worried I’d run out of ink in my Copics.
My next cons are CODCon, and Schaumburg Library Con. All of these before my giant event at Anime Central in April! It’s going to be a big jump for me, and I have a bunch of rethinking of my convention approach to do.
I’ve been working on new digital commissions as well! This Family Portrait commission is another experimental one where I’m doing my hardest to try simple painting. I’ll say that I’m getting faster and cleaner at painting, since I’m not getting lost in the weeds with brushes. I also decided to stick with my stylization and not stress hard about an exact likeness.
This one is more of a likeness drawing, and I get kinda nervous when it comes to commissions where I draw likeness. But my client was satisfied with the sketches, so I’m no longer worried.
The Art experiment continues where I skip the inking process and go straight to colors. The coloring went faster overall because I began the flat coloring at a lower resolution and I didn’t use the lasso tool on my line art.
To break out of my comfort zone, I bothered to look up how the skin varies in temperature. Unfortunately, I got frustrated by the odd in between look of this painting, thinking I was making the face look clownish. I settled for a subtle red splotch in the middle to settle my mind. I’ll figure this out if I do studies in my own time.
This next part is the more tedious part, as I’m painting over my pencil art like a physical painting. Without formal painting training, I’m going off of tutorial videos. Many about basic edge control and blending.
I don’t like the rendering step in the process because it’s boring, and I have no idea how to make it interesting. The rendering is half the reason I don’t like painting. Despite that, I press forward!
I tackled another large commission for a friend. This one was for an icon, which is simple enough for me!
I’m getting used to sketching in the Artflow Phone App on my Samsung Galaxy Note 9. I draw all my icon sketches on 150 dpi 3 inch canvases because it emulates drawing on a Post-it Note.
She liked sketch number two on the top middle and wanted the Mohawk to be longer, so I obliged.
I ink and flat color in my trusty Clip Studio Paint program! It’s a common step where I use my Lasso and Hard Round Brushes to get down a drawing area. Once that tough part is done, I can plunk down the basic colors I need with a Clipping Mask!
There’s plenty of trial and error with figuring out my lighting. Other than that, I took enough breaks to get out of my own head and simplify what I wanted to do.
Add some detailing to show off the materials and I complete a great looking icon for silly Discord conversations!
If you want a commission yourself, you can check my prices on my commissions page!
Here’s some old art from a game jam Adam and I worked on 2018 about being a liar in an office space. I was messing around with silly designs for office workers. Adam converted my art to pixel art, as I didn’t know about making pixel art at that time.
Other Art I’ve been doing and uploaded to my Illustration and Sketchbook Galleries. A bunch of bird people just vibing. I don’t draw that many birds. There’s too much to draw out there.
Some dog guard sketches that I’m brainstorming for Blackmask. I’m still doing new writing for the game, as I’ve sent so much pixel art for Adam to program. Adam’s shooting for having a playable demo ready for summer, but I’ll keep you all informed.
Monkey Knight Sketches I’m also considering for Blackmask. I haven’t thought about monkeys that much before recently. But now I’m figuring out cool ways to work in Blackmask. Having a prehensile tail is a straight-forward, yet unique way to add some flair to a sword and board warrior.
And finally, some more miscellaneous sketches I drew of people I see around when I’m at work or anywhere else. It gets tough seeing people’s faces with their masks on, so I use my imaginations on many of them.
These posts get long in the tooth, so next time I’m going to make shorter blogs for easier, faster writing. Otherwise, follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more of my daily tasks. I’ll be off to celebrate my 30th birthday!
Art and Con Prep
It’s been a productive start to my new year. Despite nursing a head cold, I had for the first few weeks, I made plenty of art to prepare for the coming year!
On February 12th, I’ll be tabling at Northwest Indiana Comic-Con! It’s the first time in two years that I’ve tabled at a con!
The things you’ve seen on my Etsy Store, you can get them at the con! This comes with the added benefit of meeting me in person and having a chat!
If you don’t know what you want to buy from me or have everything I have to offer, from my comics to my stickers, I opened a Ko-fi page as a tip jar. You can drop a small tip to me and commend my efforts!
Continue readingFebruary Devruary
Updates have certainly slowed, but honestly, not much news I can report besides livestreaming, my birthday and continuing to work hard on Blackmask.
Slow Art Week
Things 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.
Chocolate Cats, Sticker Packs and Redbubble!
The past few days have been alright for me! I have new Pastry Cat Stickers on my Etsy Store, making more progress on my commission art, and even started a RedBubble store to make T-shirts!
