It's Autumn! I can tell because I've started every day for the past week by putting on a cardigan and feeling all cosy before having to take it off at midday for fear of bumping into a surveyor and being officially classified as marshland. Still better than summer though!
We start, as all good updates begin, with a comic.
Once again this represents my ongoing attempts to practise sketching and inking comics manually, albeit in this case a little smaller than I probably should've. Indeed I inked this on the same sheet of paper as the last comic, because paper isn't free and my attitude to spending would make Ebenezer proud.
This continued head-first dive into comic inking is partly to get in touch more with physical media and create a separation between computer-generated images and my own sense of creative identity, and partly down to still not having a functioning drawing tablet.
The good news is that Huion have, after a month and a half of umm-ing, hmm-ing and ooh-I-don't-know-ing, decided to actually send me a new tablet. Alas it's been almost a week since I sent the delivery money for it and have yet to be informed that it's been dispatched. Understandably though it is, at present, a busy time for holidays in China what with Golden Week coming up, so I'll give them a bit of a pass on this occasion. They're lucky I'm busy enjoying smearing liquids on things.
To fill the interim I've decided to undertake yet another October-long daily art challenge, for which I have concocted the elegantly-formed title 'Octobink'. Yes, this wholly novel attempt to produce an ink illustration for (note 'for', not 'on') each day in October will once again revolve around mine and my friends' OCs, albeit in a less striking fashion than previous years.
This is an attempt to get me to experiment with new techniques and get much-needed experience with physical inking. As my late nan used to say, 'practise makes perfect'. She didn't know about the concept of mathematical limits and infinitesimal approximations, but the spirit's there. Anywho, the first four are ready with the following four sketched, so here are some celebratory previews!
This was, however, not the only use of my physically-minded time and wrist-tension. Having attempted a digital meme-oriented self-portrait a few weeks back, I took the opportunity to experiment in using watercolours atop inks by reproducing the image physically. The result was mixed (in quality and material) not least because I used the wrong paper and it went all pulpy and wrinkly, but we live and learn in the words of the philosopher Hedgehog, Sonic the.
Enter the miscellaneum! That's correct, we return once more to the quick run-down of transient bits and bobs that aren't worth their own sections in this update before I tell you about streaming, my plans then wish you a happy fortnight. Spoilers, I know.
We begin with a good one for me, the completion of another style roulette commission! The client seemed very pleased with it even if I made it during a period of time where I wrote such things in my work diary as 'Can we just get something other than brains? That would be lovely.'
Additional watercolour-on-ink tests were undertaken as a little gift to our Pokemon RPG GM who's unfortunately needed to park the game on hiatus for the time-being. I made some themed Snips for streaming, whilst also procuring more !locked sounds and a brand new !rule command for additional silliness.
More programming took me into a 24-hour shiny-fuelled rampage of developing a template in Godot to easily build point'n'click games atop, a project I'd been meaning to undertake ever since learning the software. Whilst this may be put towards my ongoing 'Black & Colour' series, the primary impetus was to aid in friends' own potential game projects.
Finally a little project of skirt-making from cheap material is still sitting behind me, staring daggers into my skull to infuse in me the enthusiasm to press and sew the hem, the final step that I never seem to want to do.
As for the aforementioned streaming section, why we positively blitzed our way through the back-side of Obduction and head-long into the miasma of Spooky Season! Therein we began Dracula 4. Then finished Dracula 4. Then restarted Dracula 4. Then started Dracula 5. Then finished Dracula 5. So spooky, I'm sure you'll agree.
Our weekend plans trundle on as before, hiking our way across the hazardous landscapes of Valheim before curling up into a comfortable bundle of doodles with friends.
The penultimate 'What awaits us?' section has already been foreshadowed by mention of Octobink. The pieces are small (A6, specifically) but my inexperience at a full-physical workflow makes this process a slow, but hopefully fruitful, learning necessity. Most non-commission, non-stream time will probably be devoted to that, at least until I hear word of my tablet's resurrection. Ruminations of comics, games and such will continue, but the hands will be busy.
Rest assured I intend to frolic forth on the path of physical art even when digital art is an option again. I've been somewhat disillusioned with my work of late long before technical difficulties bucked me off, and the fresh air of new media is good for the soul. Having made my social media organiser recently and populated it with past works, I realised that for the entirety of the calendar year thus-far (a year we're almost exactly three-quarters through) I have yet to make an illustration I like. I've made some that were good sure, but nothing I like. Here's hoping I can change that by the tolling of the new year.
Until then thank you verily much for your ongoing support, it does mean a great deal. I'll probably have to use it to buy more ink soon enough, and I'll thank you all personally, somehow. Perhaps I'll calligraph your names for the end of the next highlight video, who knows. Until then make sure you're all looking after yourselves, and getting a good balance of work, hobbies, down-time and outside time. I know I'm not.
Look after yourselves,
Crispy 💜