It’s been a long year, I’d say! 2023 had plenty of ups and downs, but overall, I’m alright with this year.
Besides all my art stuff, going to conventions, and I losing my iPad, I’ve been living a simple enough life. Back in August to went on a trip to Arizona to met up with my friends and visit SabotenCon. The previous time I went to Arizona, we did more hiking and exploring the state. Most of my 2023 trip was wandering the convention, but I’d love to comeback again and visit the Grand Canyon or Las Vegas.
As of wring this, I’m doing laundry and not feeling that my day is any special. I still waste my time wondering what I did wrong in the year and hoping that I can fix what’s wrong with me in the future. For now, I’ll look back on what I’ve been doing for the past month and the past year.
Life is going swell as I’ve been dabbling on art projects while attending shows and events over the autumn season. I’ve been fluctuating with my moods for most of the time and reworking my priorities list. Some days, I lose focus on my big needs of my art career. Seasonal depression might be the culprit, but I’m hanging in there and not losing focus in the unimportant stuff.
My workload keeps slipping as I’m flopping between making new art, promoting old art, learning about art, and making posts about art. With the time crunch, I can’t let it bring me down.
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.
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.
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!
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.
