Another week of sketches I’ve been cooking up in my spare time to keep myself going during the daily grind.
Mastafran January Weekly Sketchbook Week 2
Tag Archives: Sketch
Simple Art Practice on the Go
To help people out with their New Year’s Resolutions of learning to draw, I thought I’d drop in my two cents on getting started or getting into it.
A concern I find is the lack of time to draw. When I’m always on the go and away from my drawing desk at my day job, having a small sketchbook helps me jot down ideas!
Continue readingRunning to the New Year
It’s almost the new year and I look back on 2021 with thoughts. It started out with promise, but I think it went downhill closer to the end. I can’t help but say I felt directionless and the stuff I’ve been doing wasn’t as amazing as I’d like for it to be.
Let’s Make A Comic Part 1: Thumbnailing
This is my process on how I make preliminary thumbnail art for creating my comic story, Incident at the Game Store! If you’re up to having a signed physical book for yourself, you can stop by my Etsy store and grab a copy!
I was struggling to write a new comic after Shirley’s Day. So I decided to adapt an existing story to save writing time. I got the idea to create a collection of the dumb greentext stories from 4chan, Reddit, and Imgur. Many of these dumb internet posts are outlandish, so they’re a great source of visual ideas for me.
This is the original greentext story. Since it’s anonymous, I have no idea who originally wrote it. So, if someone messaged me claiming they’re the original poster, I’d have to take their word for it.
Making Changes
I’ve recently had an interview with Will Humphrey on his podcast Will Vs. You Talk Too Much! It’s a great time, and nice to touch back with my old friend from college!
You can listen here!
I’ve been making changes to my website when I have the time. Been video editing, drawing, and some other things in life.
Continue readingArt & Work
Recently, I’m posting art that I haven’t posted on this site before. As much as I maintain my Twitter and Instagram to keep my art in people’s eyes, I still need to remember that I built this website to archive my artwork.
After someone scrutinized my website, I found some issues that I’m taking time to fix. I haven’t been able to focus on personal projects as much as I’d like, as I’m crunching and focusing on finishing my freelance work for Flawless Extra-Ordinary Super Heroes.
Continue readingReturning to the Real World
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.
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.
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.
Chuggin Along
Pardon all of the sudden changes to my website if you’ve been following me on here. I’m never satisfied with a theme because many of them have little quirks and oversights that I never account for like being incompatible for mobile, or not displaying my comics correctly.
In general things aren’t as eventful due to the virus situation, but I’m doing my best to stay busy and to be positive. Right now, I’m working on a set of stickers inspired by this bread cat art I made a long while ago. A few more cats and I’ll have a worthwhile sticker pack.
Continue reading