Staying busy with my art stuff for the last few weeks. I’m doing what I can to pack my days with activity and take my mind of things. I feel good when I’m focused on a project that I care about.

I did some “Brand Synergy” and renamed my web domain from “ryanfrancisart.com” to “mastafran.com.” Since my username on Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, Artstation, and Newgrounds gets me more search results of my art than my actual birth name, I’ll just use it for my general “brand.” It’s still the same site and if I set up my redirects right, the old site name should redirect to the new names. If there are any problems, feel free to message me.

I edited together a progress video of our game tentatively called “Cole Blackmask and the Scrolls of Soleon” or just “Blackmask” It’s a Game Boy styled action-platformer about a raccoon merchant adventuring an outlandish animal world for ancient magic scrolls of cataclysmic power.

This is actually older footage melded together but I wanted to have a bigger elevator pitch video to show off to people. There’s still so much to do before we have enough for a playable demo. The music isn’t even ours because it’s from Final Fantasy Legend 2, so the music stuff isn’t squared away yet.

Adam actually did a majority of the background artwork and tiles. I worked on character animation and design, so I can’t take credit for his amazing work so far. I’m still playing catch up with my commissions but please check out my Twitch channel to get my regular pixel art updates!

As you read this, I’m giving Adam assets to work with to test game ideas like this non-player character deer girl. I like designing heroes, but I especially like designing non-heroes. It’s a challenge to make them simpler to draw so you can redraw them over and over again.

My few weeks were also hindered because I received this tablet for free for review from Veikk Co. I had a bad time dealing with the tablet and company and I never wanted to deal with them again.

The tablet pen has no Eraser button, the pen tracks badly between my two screen setup. Even when setting up the screen mapping to one monitor, the Tablet keeps freezing, dropping strokes and stops functioning. So I had to unplug and replug the tablet all the time to get it working in Clip Studio Paint. Sure, it’s a cheap tablet that might be good for beginner digital artists, but I can’t recommend this tablet even to a kid or an amateur because there’s too many issues with it.

Due to all this, I now made a new Resources Page for all the things I actually use and not what people walk to me to promote. I’ll be making a complete list of Art Tools, Software and Books I read, to show you all the things I used to make good art.

I do have a few sketches that I’ve never posted before here, mostly just updating my archive with my new and old art. I’ve been digging through old sketchbooks to find cool ideas for characters I had when I was younger. I think I’ve found some winners like the Wolf Spider and Raccoon Bee!

Finally, I made a time-lapse of my older Juice Bar Cat Illustration. I’m getting the hang of video-editing but it’s still so time-consuming. Getting the notable moments of my streams out to my Youtube Channel is a huge thing I want to do.

I have the final large sticker collection of Pastry Cats in production thanks to Sticker Mule! They’ll all be up for sale on my Etsy store in a week or so! I’ll keep you all informed!