Weekly Update 6/28/24

I know it's technically Friday, but my sleep schedule is screwed up it feels like Thursday to me. I said in my Daily WIP updates this week that I have no desire to post things publicly right now. I'm going to take a moment to expand what I meant by that.

 I've been watching other artists and content creators releasing stuff regularly on Patreon and other pay sites and then releasing a bunch of content all at once. I released pages of Toph Heavy because I wanted to maintain relevancy and drive traffic to Patreon and Subscribestar. That strategy didn't work.

Think of it this way: Imagine a YouTube essayist trying to maintain relevance by releasing 30 seconds of a video at a time. The ideas would be incomplete, and it wouldn't work overall. That's what I was doing. I'm willing to bet that the people here are the ones interested in regular unfinished updates. I assume/hope that's what you're paying for (in addition to just general support) and I feel like giving that to everyone undercuts that support. It's also time-consuming in a "data entry" kind of way. Public release days dominates a chunk of my processing power in a way that is a detriment to my work. So I'm going to take that energy and refocus it in to my work.

With that said, lets talk about what I did this week. Firstly, I really hated this page. I felt like the anatomy and perspective were off, so I completely redrew it.

Before (ignore the lack of eyelashes)

 
after

 
I started rendering this page but stopped at the initial blending and moved on to other pages to establish basic lighting. I stopped because it felt too mushy. It still feels too mushy. And I need to come back to it. But I want to maintain some forward momentum.

 

I establish lighting with an initial cel-shade pass. All of the stuff I do starts off as Cel-shading because its easier for me to conceptualize how light falls across a form. I'll go back to these, clean them up, and soften edges to give it a painterly feel.

And that's this week's work. I feel like I'm going to repeat myself a lot as I detail my process but I think that's just the nature of things. Thanks for your continued support, and I'll see you next week.