Actual art! Actual art! YES. It’s amazing! I scored an extra long weekend from work for Easter, had some time to be myself, and yesterday morning I just woke up and had the biggest “aha!” moment and needed to draw.
So the result is tikedi with rabbit ears.
Judge me not. I didn’t say my aha moment was true genius, but you have to admit that it’s cute.
As for actual updates, I apologize for the quiet lately (again). Phase Two of getting my artistic life together (and I apologize, I didn’t realize there was going to be a Phase Two) is almost sorted. Its been harder to get a balance going between my day job, art, writing, and comic stuff than I thought, even with the buffer. My biggest problem is that I tend to go too whole hog in one direction and it’s hard to do just a little bit of everything rather than focusing entirely on one creative outlet. I blame the habit of working on almost nothing but Prophecy of the Circle for the past few years.
But I’m finally getting it! I stumbled for a while there, but I’ve built up some writing, some art, and, of course, more comics for the next couple of weeks. Writing’s mostly been on my NaNoWriMo novel of 2016, “Alpha Base” (a working title, of course) and I fully intent to finish that one this year. I had a really rough version of the plot down in 2016 and now I’m focusing on fleshing out the characters and smoothing out that plot. After that I’ll work on making the world-building work.
That’s kind of a switch from how I’ve been trying to do things for the past few years, but it’s a necessary change. I’ve spent years telling myself that I have to have a concrete world, built perfectly and with every detail explained before I start telling my story. The result tends to be that the story never gets written because I spend too much time worrying about whether its detailed enough and whether its perfect and logical enough that people aren’t going to poke holes in it and then I just lose the entire spark to fear and uncertainty. So I’m going to do things differently in order to keep it fun and engaging, as it should be: tell the story first, then, once I have something down that makes me feel good, fit the world around it. We’ll see how this goes.
After Alpha Base is done I’ll probably come back to The Weather. That one needs to simmer a bit longer in my head. I have the beginning of it and the ending, but the whole middle is just too fuzzy to work with, I find. It’ll come to me, though.
And then, of course, I’ll have some art for you guys shortly. There’ll be a few sketches from last month’s Suggest-a-Sketch, some fanart of various things that’ve been on my mind, and some Prophecy of the Circle and Alpha Base related sketches. Looking forward to showing you!
And again, thanks so much for being patient with me while I try to make everything work. I can’t stand to not be a writing and an artist and to make comics, and curses to the day for being only 24 hours long. I’ll win, though. One way or the other I’ll do that thing. 🙂
And Happy Easter! I hope it was a great weekend for all of you.