March Update - Monthly Round Up

I've got to admit, I'm glad this month is over. It's been an extremely busy and testing month from a personal point of view. I started a new job at the start of the month so adjusting to a different schedule has been a bit hectic and a few days I got taken out by a car whilst riding home from work so that's been fun. Fortunately I came out of it with minimal injuries and the insurance is taking care of the rest.

So let's see what's going on in March!

February Content - Now Expired

I was quite happy with how Autumn came out. I think I'd done my best job to date of hiding the keys in the model to prevent the need for gap filling as much as possible. But now that February is over Autumn will be finding her way to my Gumroad store and available at a 30% discount to patrons of all pledge levels. 

Poll Winner: Claudia

Looks as though my  Spotify playlist this month is going to be full of glam rock and 80s hair metal. This makes me very happy.  Claudia has topped out February's poll which actually surprised me as I'd expected Katsumi to take the top spot. I can't wait to get started on her. She should be a fairly straight forward sculpt with the main part of the complexity coming in the form of her firearm.

Experimental Change to Polls

To reiterate from last month's update, March will see a slight change to the way I'm doing polls. It can be frustrating to see your favourite concept beaten out each month. While I can't do anything about who votes for what (democracy is democracy), I'm going to reduce the number of options from 4 to 3 so at least the distribution might be a little closer to each other.

So I won't be adding a new option to the poll this month. I will/have, however update The Ritual with some new elements and some polish. She was one of the first concepts I did when I launched Patreon - 1 of 4 that I managed to get done in under 2 days to give everyone 4 options to begin with. Since I'm doing one sketch a month now I'm able to spend more time on them and I think the difference in polish of these concepts is pretty evident.

Please keep in mind that these concepts are just concepts to give a rough idea of what to expect. While I will always try to put in as much effort as I can with the time I have, these concepts do fall behind the main priority of the monthly model, so I'll try to keep my standard where I can, but it may slip every so often depending on the time available to me (I still work full time after all).

Model of the Month: Gunnhild or "Ylgir", She-wolf of the White Wastes

I'm going to dub Gunnhild as the most complex model I've sculpted so far. She has a lot of elements that required a lot of high detail work. Her shield featuring Skoll and Hati, the wolves that chase the sun and moon across the sky in an attempt to devour them, her war horn at her hip with bands of intricate sculpted metal, or the runes that adorn her armour strap, there has been a lot of attention given to her individual accessories and I could quite happily go without sculpting fur trims for a little while. 

I am extremely satisfied with the result and have tried to make cuts and keys as hidden as possible in the multi-part print and I've also given a few different options for her. You can switch out the shield for her sword, and the sword and sheathe at her hip for just a sheathe if you choose that option. She also has a second NSFW option now with even fewer clothes.

One thing to note with this release is the lack of pre-supported STLs. My printer is still currently out of order, though I hope to remedy that next week with the arrival of new parts. As a result I haven't been able to prepare and test pre-supported files. If I can get my printer working soon, however, I will be able to remedy that and release the files as soon as I can.

One other thing - due to the detail in this model the file sizes are a bit larger than usual. There have been a few of you guys doing crazy big prints (yes, you know who are), and the detail that'd normally be lost in a smaller scale print come out quite nicely where they'd never normally be seen, so it's for this reason I'd rather keep the detail rather than crush it to reduce file sizes.

Usual Content Stuff

The rest of the content is all done and will be available on March 3rd.  This includes the usual renders that accompany the monthly model and all the work in progress shots compiled together as well as high res versions of the poll sketches. 

Google Drive Clean Up

I decided to do a bit of clean up in the Google Drive. All previous Patreon Goals and extras have now been consolidated under the The Trove folder as it's been long enough now.

Twitch and YouTube

While working on Gunnhild I was able to stream some of my work in progress on Twitch and have posted the VoDs on Youtube too. You can find links to both channels below. I can't stream regularly, unfortunately, but I will try to stream more often or when I'm doing something interesting on the model.

 https://www.twitch.tv/ritualcasting

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCW7M4bAFGhmONakSMFmuhCQ?view_as=subscriber

100 Patron Goal and Massive Thanks

We're nearly there guys. If we can reach the 100 patron mark this month I'll be releasing the Murder Crow monster sculpt. Thanks to you guys I'm creeping closer to the point where I could potentially drop to part-time work and focus more energy and time into this passion of mine. I've been toying with ideas of what I'd do with the extra time and haven't come to a conclusion just yet. It may, however, involve miniatures or male versions to accompany my usual female characters. So we'll have to see if/when we get there. Until then, though, thanks so much for your support. You're all amazing and I'm loving seeing the results of your painting.

Have a great March everyone!