Back To Blackmask!
Tag Archives: Video Games
Selling Captain Falcon Crossover Art
I’m selling my 11″x17″ ink drawing of Two Captain Falcons for $100 on Ebay.
Before I took a harder line stance on making fan art back in 2015, I made a piece of Captain Falcon and Sam Wilson as Captain America.
When I first heard that Falcon became Captain America in the comics, I thought the idea of “Captain Falcon” being in the Marvel Universe was funny to me.
If you want this, you can buy from the Ebay page. You can also email me or message me on the Contact Sheet from my About page!
Bumbling and Scrambling
Life’s been unpredictable for the past few weeks with doing extra hours at my day job, getting work done on Flawless Extraordinary Super Heroes, and Adam’s doing his own freelance stuff. I even took a short break away from art and the internet to reground myself and organize.
At the moment, I’m stuck on some things with Blackmask. I’m learning more workflows and thinking of a direction for making the background tile assets.
Right now, I’m learning new tips from pixel artists like MortMort, CupOhJoe and LumpyTouch when I can. I’ve also been trying out converting my art into pixels from 2D Will Never Die, It’s promising, but I’m not as happy with the current results.
My Twitch streaming schedule has also started to slip. Sometimes, I have a hard time getting into a headspace to entertain and draw for streams after work. I did one game stream to shake up my rut, but my machine isn’t good enough to play often. It might be a productive way to relax, but I don’t want to make my Twitch about gaming considering people followed me for my art.
Besides this, I’m staying a float, sporadically posting on my Twitter and Instagram. Most of my sketches I post there are environment concept sketches for Blackmask.
Sketching has taken a bit of a back seat more toward thumbnailing and writing game ideas down during my bus driving.
Despite having not much going on, I keep feeling a pressure on myself to do better than I currently am. I never feel confident that these sketches are interesting enough to post on my socials because they aren’t characters. I have a bad enough time thinking about social media as it is!
Marching Forward on Blackmask
Progress on Blackmask presses on as I’m still making environments. It’s an uphill climb, but I can’t get discouraged.
For a short moment, I’ve been learning Pxyel Edit as it’s makes it easier to create repeatable tile sets. The program’s missing so many features that I ended up going back to learning more tricks in Aseprite.
2/8/2021 Blackmask Recent Development Stuff
With the fruits of Adam’s labor reveals a new progress video for Blackmask!
This progress video done between the last video and now, includes new additions of Slopes, Dashing, NPCs, and Enemies. There’s some jank of course, but development still persists!
Continue readingArt 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 readingDoing 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: Project Blackmask
If you’ve been following my art and this blog before 2020, you know that I draw a lot of anthropomorphic animal characters. These animals were ideas for characters and world for a webcomic idea that I was thinking about for the past nine years.
It would’ve been the ongoing adventures of a plucky adventure merchant named Cole Blackmask as travels to strange lands, questing for loot to sell, battling powerful warriors and mystical forces who reside all over this funny animal world.
What I’ve Been Up To: Busy, Busy!
I’ve been drawing small stuff to pay my bills, fill my portfolio, and staying busy. Despite, constantly feeling like I’m behind on everything I’m getting the things expected of me done.
Progress is being made working on the Illustrations on Flawless Extra-Ordinary Superheroes, knocking out a larger illustration and pushing forward to the next few ones.
Pardon the Mess
It’s been a while since I’ve updated anything online. Over the past few months, I’ve made an extremely sloppy transfer to Bluehost in a rough effort to improve my website. My big goal is to set up my website as my core hub for all of my web presence including where I’ll post and sell my comics and post my news. I’ll still have my typical social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram but I want to one day sunset them as I think they don’t do much to help me out in my art journey.
Adam Mortell, Ryan Cambruzzi, Vincent Rusca and I worked on a game for Global Game Jam this year. I’m bummed that I didn’t do more for the game but, I learned how to make pixel art for the first time.
Besides that, I’ve been tackling some new freelance artwork and commission stuff including working on a new book in the Flawless Extra-Ordinary Superheroes Series. With this, I’m still trying to fund printing for Incident at The Game Store in color but some car problems have come up so money’s lacking.