Hello Everyone!

After posting my New Year’s Update, I felt as if it was heavily lacking as to what I’m actually working on and how somethings I haven’t talked about recently have been going.

The Big Four:

I was doing some reflection, and found that there were mainly four projects that are *live* right now. Each of them receive almost weekly work, even if it’s small:

“Life of the Beyond”:

So, I was at a local arts center where an artist was showing some of their work before a play. I got the contact info of one of the managers… and now I’m doing a gallery showing for about one and a half weeks from late August to Early September.

I’m planning on having an opening and or closing during the show, and wanted to have an open invitation to everyone here on NG :)

I’m still working out the details since I’m focusing on travel details for school, but it’s going to be a wild time.

This is one of my priority projects at the moment, since there’s so much planning and a lot of physical work I have to do. It’s going to be fun, but a lot of work. I’ll provide more updates when I can.

Rick’s Diner

This is a comic that has been floating around for a bit and only recently came to light.

It spawned as a branch off of the now retired “Afterocalypse” idea.

I’ve been doing mostly writing and pen tests of the characters, and so far the writing has been pretty smooth.

That’s about it, you’ll see a lot more drawings with a few of the character from this (like the most recent), and it’s been a fun overarching project behind the scenes.

Robot New Year’s

This is a short cartoon that I started work on late December 2021, y’know, for New Year’s. It’s been a testing board for my animation process and working with Opentoonz to the fullest.

Back in December of 2021, I had just finished a class with a professor to work on the storyboard for Telebuddies. The class went ok. It was a tough time for everyone on campus, but I learned a lot about breaking up animation shots and sequences.

The animation is overall at about 60% completion. Mainly because I’ve been stuck in robotics laboratories all of last year.

I consider finishing this a prerequisite to finishing Telebuddies EP 1. Which is another reason why it’s been delayed a long time. My life also changed a lot since 2018 (which was when the original script was written) and the Telebuddies changed a lot to reflect that.

Robot New Year’s is planned to be finished before the end of summer, since it’s just a lot of grinding left.

Leech Band Pins:

I’ve been hinting at it on my Twitter here and there about a pin set that I’ve been working on getting manufactured. It’s a 4 pin set that’s pretty big and which I wore on my backpack for a good amount of time.

I worked with a manufacturer that I liked their quality and sent out a final request for more sets, and after about 5 sets being distributed among friends… we found issues. My friends and I have been doing testing and working to push what I initially ordered and I’ve been getting more advice from other artists.

At the time of writing, I’m getting samples from a different company and we’ll be doing testing and I will be trying to break them and throwing them half across a campus building to see how things hold up.

I’ll give updates when the pins are on full release. I won’t be talking about them much otherwise because it’s mostly emailing and invoices to deal with this project at the moment.

This is slated to be finished by end of summer this year, taking into consideration I won’t be anywhere near my normal set up for two months and can’t receive packages “normally”.

(I’m also helping some folks on campus with a game, not important to this list for detail, but important for completeness :) )

Also In Queue:

Telebuddies (has a pending pre req of Robot New Year’s)

Resetting up my Etsy (has a pending pre req of the Leech Band Pins)

Resetting up my Kofi (pending pre req of me finding time)

Dead:

Patreon:

So, my Patreon is pretty much dead at the moment. Most of the stuff that’s available right now is about it, my Patreon is now pretty much similar to my Kofi in the sense that, if you want to send me money… cool! I can’t really give anything back besides a digital high five. It might change at the end of the year, but I can’t see that far ahead. We’ll see together.

Reflections:

Something that I’ve learned from the past year and I’m still working on is mostly time management and being honest with myself on how much time I have and can spend. I’m very used to having multiple projects at once, but each with differing commitment timelines. The pins, for example, are low on time and work I need to actively do, and fits in well. However, larger art projects like Robot New Year, takes time I have to set aside.

So, I guess it’s best for me to reiterate what I’m doing is what I like to do, and drawing these characters in the margins of my notebooks has been getting me through college. And it’s been a repeating thing, but I’m sometimes scared to branch out in art and just do silly drawings that aren’t anything “serious” when I want to do drawings that are just… me. It’s very much a trying to maintain a sense of “professionalism”, but what’s illustration without telling the story you want?

I know which drawings are ones where I just kind of let myself relax and draw because I smile remembering the hours I spent working on them.

I want to do more of that as I did we a few of my recent illustrations.

Even as someone who draws robots a lot, I want to make drawings are more.. human...

And man, humans are weird.

-TheDyingSun