This week and the future, I’m starting a new task where I scan and show art that I’ve been working on for the past few days.

These are the daily sketches I post on my social accounts as fuzzy phone pictures. When I get the time, I scan them and edit the pictures for clarity or future coloring. Being honest with myself, these end up just being in my computer files and then abandoned as it’s hard to finish art when I hate the coloring process.

This year, I’m making a stronger effort to sketch backgrounds on the regular. This sketch came from a waterfall study, then I added characters to get myself more invested.

Some doodles elaborating on some of those monkey monks I drew the other day. I don’t draw that many monkey characters, but honestly, I don’t draw my existing characters with any frequency either.

A monk character or a place with martial artists would be cool for Blackmask, but it’s tough to think of ways to do that doesn’t boil down to kitchen sinking all the stupid anime and manga crap I read.

Goat Cultists for a story I’m interesting in writing on and off. I want to make a short comic staring Cole, and this has been in my writing archives in various versions and notes. Since this is the most developed story in my pile of scraps, I wanted to salvage this into something I could make into a short story.

The Circle of Mh’n Tv Ba’aa are an alleged hiking group. One might see them stalking the Clambrtop Mountains at odd hours of night. Members of this group are guarded, refusing to elaborate on anything they’re questioned for. Witnesses also claim some of them are armed.

Withing their ranks are the Goat Enforcers who ensure that everybody in the group are having a good time under the orders of their Great Leader to prepare for the “Next Configuration”. With this event, all will be changed and their wildest dreams will come true.

In Cole’s travels as a wandering merchant, he encounters this cult doing terrible deeds and meddles in their affairs through his guile, wit, and toughness.

Overall, I have enough to work with an outline. There’s still gaps in details such as the characterizations and motives and all that. It’s a pain in the butt because most of this end up with me falling into a writer’s block, reminding me how uninteresting my life is and how I can’t think of interesting people to based my characters on. Which means anything I write will burn into a failure.

Some sketches that began and ended with, “Kangaroo Drawn by Rob Liefeld.” These sketches ended up spinning off into my betting my art block by drawing “bad.”

And finally a father-son blacksmith duo who Cole sometimes trades with to reforge or resell weapons and tools he finds in the world.

What I want to do with notable characters in Blackmask is use character types in fantasy stories that don’t get elaborated on. Characters such as the Innkeeper, Shop Owner, Blacksmith, or even the Town Greeter are in countless role-playing video games I play.

Overall, I like thinking of the “normal” characters of a fictional world.They’re more relatable to me doing jobs diminishing meaning. I don’t do enough to elaborate on all the stupid designs I sketch to deal with the crappy days in my life.

I’ll let this go for now. I keep making bad decisions when it comes to my art choices. I’m focused on posting everyday instead of posting work of quality and it bites me up. I’m realizing that I’m doing the same thing I’ve always been doing and sketching millions of sketches without thought.

Again, I’m angry at myself for continuing my bad drawing and project management habits that hang up my making art that anyone cares about. I don’t care if I’m doing fine, I still feel that what I’m currently doing is mediocre and going nowhere.