There’s not much to write about besides being laser focused on my freelance stuff. I’m in the final stretch of the books’ completion, so hopefully within the month I’ll be through with it.
Unspecific Art Life
Tag Archives: 2020
2020: A Year in Review
I 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.
Holiday Lyfe
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!
Etsy Holiday Sale 2020
From this Monday to the week before Christmas, I’m having a holiday sale of my entire collection of books, prints and stickers on my Etsy Store!
Order any item in my Etsy store for 50% off and get free shipping on them!
Art and Logo Working
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 readingSlow 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.
What I’ve Been Up To: Doing the Arting
I’m doing alright for the past few weeks as there isn’t much to report. I’m still plugging away at my ongoing freelance commissions and Blackmask.
Artwise, I wasn’t very productive. My day job is beginning to pick up again and I spent most of my week making a promotional video for my Youtube Channel.
On Saturday, October 24th, I’ll be doing the Hammond Public Library Virtual Fanfest doing a 9am livestream on YouTube about making mini comics.
All Cat Stickers Are For Sale!
My entire collection of Pastry Cat Stickers are on sale on my Etsy store right now! All of my Pastry Cat series is now purchasable!
Wheatley even has a full body without losing his holographic look! The bread cat stickers specifically are holographic, so they’re especially good!
I also sell all the cats as T-Shirts on my Redbubble Store as well!
Just a reminder that I’ll be at the Hammond Public Library Virtual Fanfest on Saturday, October 24th doing a livestream on YouTube about making mini comics.
There are few conventions that I’m doing for the rest of the year but you can check my Conventions Schedule to find out when I’ll be doing my next con!
Doing What I Can
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.
Continue readingWhat I’ve Been Up To: Sketching and Video Editing
I’m keeping my head above water with my commissions and other art, but I feel slightly more accomplished in the past few weeks as I’ve been learning to make edit videos like my chat with Bryant Bell. We talk about art, conventions, and life stuff so if you have an hour or time, please give it a listen.
