Long time no update– I know I meant to make this a monthly thing, and although I still probably could do it, some months would be so quiet I’d be hard-pressed to find something to write about. Things haven’t been that quiet, but time has gotten away from me for sure. I’m trying to figure out what the best timing of these would be, because a month feels too short, but I’ll just play it by ear for now. I had a draft for March prepped several months ago, but never finished it, so I’m going to rope it all into this one. After I started that draft, In April I had a tooth extraction that set a few things back that I wanted to do, including updating this. My work schedules been changed since then as well. Earlier this month, I came down with a nasty cold that gave me a terrible dual ear infection, that I only found out about after going to urgent care twice. So, due to my long absence, I apologize for the length of this update, hah. But what have I been up to?

Inspirations + Last Time Goals

For my goals from last time, I wanted to work more on my personal projects and maybe read some books from my shelf. I didn’t work much on those projects (and I’ll get more into that later) and although I didn’t read the books on my shelf I wanted, I did…. buy some more books! And I’ve been consuming a lot more media just for my leisure but also pieces I really enjoy and are inspiring as stories. A few months ago I was getting back into anime pretty hard– which in many ways was one of my roots in art. I’ve been getting into Spy Family, and decided to buy a few volumes of the manga. I also watched Given, which gave me some inspiration for my band comic.

Mostly, sillily maybe, I’ve been really been getting back into gaming. After having a big rut with Genshin Impact, I found myself really invested in it for the first time in awhile and I’ve been hyper fixating and playing it often. It even inspired me to do some related stickers, which I’ll get into a bit later.

After watching Across the Spider-Verse in theaters twice, I decided to go ahead and order the art books for both the first and second movies. Many years ago, ITSV inspired me a lot and I was enthralled by it, and the same has happened again. It’s honestly a technical and artistic source of genius, and is everything I think animation could be, I’m hoping this books can serve as an inspiration for me in the future.

Goals Re: Social Media

Another goal of mine was to finally post my commission info on Instagram, which I actually did a few months ago at this point. I got over run by scammers and bots in my DMs quickly– which i didn’t even see until months later because I forgot to check message requests. I never expected to get many real biters from it anyway, and specifically wrote to contact me through email or my website, so I knew those scammers never read it anyway. Although I knew Instagram is full of those things, I wanted to do it to say i did, and to finally post something new. I’ve been thinking about social media and how much I dislike the format, for lack of a better word. Instagram never really supported artists to a massive degree, but now that it’s switching into short form video like TikTok, it’s even harder. It’s hard not to just abandon it completely. Likewise, twitter is… well, It’s been twitter. I’ve posted on there occasionally and although I like it more than Instagram, still not that sustainable for artists, especially among policy and leadership changes.

In that vein, I’ve been an avid tumblr user for about 10 years now, and although I have had art blogs in the past I let them fizzle out. I started one (still empty at time of writing this) and have thought about ways to integrate it with my website, this blog, or something else. There’s also something to say about how as I use it for leisure, and have a blog I’ve had since I was 13, so it almost feels weird to integrate that with my art/business. It’s definitely one of the most freeing social medias, but a lot of the leg work in discovery and algorithms (lack thereof, mostly) is from users and myself. I’ll probably work on that in the future, but it’s on the back burner for now. I might start sharing these blogs on to it, so if you see it there, that’s why.

Other Projects

Over the last few months, I’ve been slowly but surely working on another project I was approached for. In March, I was working on the preliminaries, thumbnails and designs, things like that. It was a long time since I thumbnailed or drew any comic pages, so it felt a little strange but of course, it was something I needed to do. The art rut I had mostly ended in every other front, except for my comics. I hadn’t made a comic page since I graduated, and part of me was worried I could even do it anymore.

It’s the beginning pages of a pitch with a script, and it was honestly pretty fun working on something that wasn’t mine. There’s something nice about not being ABLE to double guess and mull over my decisions in the thumbnails– the words are already decided, what’s shown in each panel is already decided, all I need to do is pick the angle and keep things consistent. Its a fun, different puzzle, where there are constraints.

A lot of my thumbnail process involves reworking, erasing, trying it over and over, which that still exists to a degree, but its a lot less. If it’s my own work I’m constantly trying to change things as I’m working in it, which impedes my process (or perhaps– IS my process? I don’t think I can separate the two.) It makes me also realize for my own work, the more work I put into my scripts, the less time It’ll take me to thumbnail. It almost feels like in comics, there’s always gonna be about the same amount of work put into the total piece, but which step you choose to focus on changes. For instance, if you have really really loose thumbnails, it will make your penciling process a lot slower. You make up that time and effort somewhere else in the process if you don’t put it in first. I’m not sure if one method is better than the other, but it’s food for thought.

Since March, I’m now in the inking process, which I was looking forward to. I love inking. It’s a lot of fun. I’m wondering how my inks will fit into fully colored work– and I’m wondering how I’ll be coloring it– but I’m looking forward to keeping up the process. Here’s a teeny tiny sneak peek.

CRAFT PROCESSES

Before I had a section on working on my zines in these updates, and since I’m mostly done with zine design I’m not sure what to call this section. This is not related to my art process, like making drawings or pages, but the process of the craft side maybe– any book or zine making, or anything else that relates to my art but isn’t drawing, I guess.

I finally decided to revamp my font that I made last year in school– It was done hastily at the time, so now I have time to make it nice. I use Calligraphr, and decided to get the premium– It’s about 16 dollars for 3 months, so I thought it was a good deal to be able to mix and match different versions of my font. I originally had 3 fonts, missing some key characters, all separate that I would physically change between if I wanted the separate characters. I used this to make it into one font that randomizes the characters to make it look more like hand writing. I really enjoy hand lettering, and how my hand lettering looks, but it is very time consuming– It’s an easy place to save some time in the comic process, as well as how important typed fonts are for translating and the like. It’s also what I used for the page I showed in the last section. The folded sheets are two of my original fonts, with only uppercase letters, while the others are my new fonts with full lower and uppercase, as well as symbols.

Sometime in March, I decided to get a Cricut Joy to die cut stickers. I had saw some YouTube tutorials on how to get it to cut them with it, along with a sale and how small and compact it was, so I thought it was a good investment. I didn’t get the chance to mess with it until a month or so later, which made me realize it was a little more frustrating and tedious than I wanted. Since it doesn’t print, pin point cutting stickers is more of a MacGyver effort– the machine isn’t made for it, but you can do a work around for it. You have to get the paper in the same registration on the mat each time, keep it in the same exact spot, reload your mat the same way, and cut it from the app. This worked okay, but again, it was very tedious and came with a lot of mistakes.

At one point I stumbled on a Brother brand die cutter- I have a Brother Brand printer and sewing machine, so I know they’re both powerful and affordable machines. The Brother Scan N Cut is so much easier than the Cricut Joy for my needs– and a pretty big upgrade in my opinion, considering the price difference. The Cricut Joy at full price is $169 (I picked it up for about $99 on sale, along with maybe $30 of accessories) and cuts about 4.5×9 inches at a time; it’s possible to get a longer mat but that’s how wide it goes. The Scan N Cut has a 12×12 inch mat area, but can go longer or use a roller. The model I have, the SDX85S, retails around $299, accessories included, and I got it for around $200 on sale (And even less with rewards points- thank you Office Depot). As long as you have the space for it, it’s a nice machine for a good price and little hassle. It doesn’t print (Which I personally liked, since I already have a printer) but as the name suggests, has a high functioning scanner that automatically detects the edges of your work. If you don’t want to, you don’t even have to connect a computer at all. It has an LED screen that you can control it from, and it automatically tells the edges of what to cut, where you can add an offset border if you’d like, which I really loved. Of course, you can also connect it to designs on your computer, but the versatility really enticed me.

This is not supposed to sound like an ad for Brother– I’m sure other machines work better for other people, but after trying both that’s my opinion on it. The Joy is good, and I’m keeping it for now as it can do other things besides stickers that I might mess around with, but for my own needs, the Scan N Cut was so much better. Here’s my printing space with my die cutters, which I finally organized, and the stickers didn’t turn out too shabby, either.

Tabling 2: Electric Boogaloo

Of course, the main reason I got interested in a die cutter what that I wanted to make stickers myself for another tabling event in my town. It was the same operators as last time, so I knew more of what to expect. This time, instead of focusing a lot on new prints or zines to make, I focuses on presentation and stickers. My table partner and I bought display pieces and practiced a few times on how to put it together.

I looked for awhile on buying a display for my zines, but everything was either too big/small or too expensive. I found this post from StuffAeaMade on tumblr (here’s a link to their gumroad!) where they made a DIY display out of foam core and I thought it was genius! It was harder to cut out neatly than I thought, but I spent two or three days getting all the pieces cut and put together. I changed the dimensions a bit to suit my needs (doing that math was surprisingly hard to wrap my head around.) Since this photo I’ve painted the outside of the side panels, but I still need to paint the inside. Other all though, I think it came out good, and I can’t wait to use it more.

I designed a handful of stickers– Mostly my characters or things that interested me. I did make a little fan art stickers, but only things I really cared about. Since I’ve been really into Genshin Impact recently, I made a few of my favorite characters, as well as redoing some very old sticker designs I had to refresh them. I cleaned up an old sketch and also made a Fall Out Boy themed sticker as well.

So, over all, we were a lot more prepared this time, and were really excited for the day! Or display was miles better than last time, and was easier to show everything we had. My only sort of regret was it was hard to see either of us from the way the table was, but was sort of nice to be anti social in that way, hah.

Unfortunately, it was scheduled on the same day as a huge art festival in my town. I was optimistic that this wouldn’t make too much of a difference, as people might check it out and then go here, or vice versa. Since this was the second event for the organizers, there was more advertising than before as well. Those things didn’t really affect anything though, and we both barely made any money. I know its not all about the money, but it’s a little discouraging. It was pretty much dead for the vast majority of vendors most of the time. We both took time off of our job for it, and spent a lot of time preparing. Over all though, I know it had nothing to do with our artwork, and instead was the circumstance. At least we have everything set up and ready for next time. Just a few days ago we just got informed we were accepted to another event in town, so that’s definitely has lifted my spirits and got me excited again for that next time.

Mulling over a Store front

In that vein, I’ve been looking more and more into putting an online shop up– I’m between a few different platforms– I’m really interested in Big Cartel, but I know I’d have to do all the advertising myself (Which I’m not that good at, hah!) Etsy is a possibility, and has a good discovery system, but I know they’ve had a lot of policy changes in the last years that make me worry what else they’ll do for profits. I’ve also seen people who have both, and redirect Etsy customers to the other when possible. If there’s anyone reading who has any opinions on any of that, moistly the platform I’d love to hear it.

Goals

The only sort of stern thing I’d like to do is possibly make a very small zine for my next table, finish inking my project, and maybe start the process rolling to set up a store. I’m going to try, for now- to have a lot less stern goals. Mostly because I’m not sure how often I’m going to try to keep these coming– I still want to keep writing these posts, but I’ve learned for me, a month is too small of time for how much I want to do with them. I know I’d have less to update with, but I’d rather have at least something interesting to say. On the other side, I don’t want to go this many months without one again, so they wont be this long, hopefully. I’ll certainly try to figure it out, and figure out what to call these, but that’s about it for now. I could keep going, but I shouldn’t. (This is SO LONG REMY. STOP)

If any one has gotten this far, thank you for spending some time with my rambles. I’ll leave with a character sketch I did recently. Until next time!