End of Summer Update

Hey guys, sorry for the unannounced hiatus, but I got caught up in a series of home improvements and usual Summer laziness.

Sure trying over and over for new profile headers ate up a discrete amount of time, and I'm finishing the third, which seems pretty satisfying and representative of what I make.

And I've decided to start a new series (the  teaser of that you see above) or better, a new habit of one-hour  doodles per day, which is a stretch considering that each one of the  characters took me an hour (in their full figure), but it's for sure a  more time-economical way to vent out some ideas that flutter in my mind.

This one, in particular, is pretty suggestive since it will involve muscle growth and will be released daily during October, as a way to do the art challenge month without losing my mind and my hand.

Speaking of which, another thing I'm planning to do  is an illustrated calendar of 2024 which is going to list every art challenge and event I can find. Inktober, Minotaur March, Mermay, Smaugust, and also  singular recurrences like Pokemon Day, or May the Fourth. I will list  every World [Animal] Day, just like Catholic Calendars list the saints. I  wonder if I should list also moon phases while I'm at it. For  gardeners, wiccans and werewolves, you know.

For now, I'm planning to format it like a one-page desktop background,  but if I find good feedback while posting some teasers in the last  months of 2023, I might consider selling printed versions with multiple  sheets you can flip. The single-page version will require also a bunch  of graphic design study since I will have to condense both text and  artwork in a very tiny space and I might directly ask you for feedback.

"Uh  wow this guy can't keep up with his comics and he has picked two more  projects that will drive him crazy." I guess you're thinking.

And I agree with you.

But this time I have another move to make: using 3D.  It's not the first time that I say it, but the previous one I was doing  it all on my own with the bare-bones theory behind me. This week  instead I've caught up with some of the hundreds of hours (and euros) of  Blender tutorials I've bought in the past years. I started off with a  pretty notorious course from Victory 3D about sculpting an orc that would fit in a WoW cinematic, and I was doing pretty well with the  modeling.

Then I stopped because I needed to make quick poses and light  references for my 2D art, not realistic models that would melt my  computer for the number of textures they carry on.

I will finish the course but with calm, after I'm done with the three that delve into the basics of Blender and animating and shading in a pleasant way low-poly models, which is exactly what I'm searching for.

Right now I'm following the rigging course,  and it's blowing my mind, but I totally see myself in the near future  modeling low-poly versions of a series of stereotypical characters  (gorilla, orc, big guy, werewolf, ogre, hyper, normie etc.) slapping on  them a toon shader, staging a scene in ten minutes instead of doing  endless trial and error with poses and references, and then use my 2D  skills to draw over a bunch of polygons real characters with curves and  expressions.

With the right shaders and tweaks, it would be a great way to have crowd shots already done without relying on premade silhouettes that don't match up with my  style or painstakingly sketching out dozens of different characters  every time.

Like the body-kun puppet but useful.

It's already what a lot of  artists are doing, and Clip Studio Paint has a built-in feature for 3D  models, which is as useful as a bicycle for a fish in my case since  they're just the skinny boy and skinny girl body types and I'm not  getting into Isekai any time soon.

What I'm getting into is 3D animation! Which is going to function just a support for 2D animation.  I'm not fooling myself: it will take a year at least since I want to  retrict the time doing that to one hour per day. But doing the  storyboard I'm already listing all the isolated loops and assets (like  character designs and background elements) I can realize and post  separately, so it won't come out of nothing on October 2024 but you will  be quite teased.

What will be about? Well, three elements for now: barbarians, demons and magic mirrors.

It's  quite the challenge but I feel motivated, and one of the reasons is  that I've decided to remove a certain someone from my life.

Warning: long-winded recollection of events that demonstrate my lack of self-respect ahead. Reader discretion is advised.

You  might have already noticed him in the past since he was the one  commenting on every single post of mine in a very awkward and  ungrammatical way.

He was a client and  patron, with a thing for jumpchain, which is a hybrid  roleplay-fanfiction challenge on Reddit about guys jumping from one  narrative universe to another. I never got into that because it feels  convoluted as fuck, but I always respected the endeavor. And I always  found very endearing his apparent coping with reality through writing  and imagination, since I relate to that, and also his efforts to make it  a long-distance friendship, even if responding to his questions about  my life always made me uncomfortable.

But I  soon realized that he was sucking my energies and time away. Every  commission/reward he asked for was a character design starting from  commission docs that were at least 10 pages long, written in broken  English that always made me assume he was an immigrant in the US, but  no, he is 100% native English speaker but he can't write a sentence  starting with the fucking subject.

He asked me to do editing  work for his docs and stories, and I can't stress it enough, I'm not a  native English speaker. I'm Italian: I learned English on YouTube, I  don't feel qualified in the least to do editing, but still, I get why he  asked me for help.

Because I write in much  better English than him and I'm cheap as fuck. Why am I cheap? Because  I'm an idiot moved by pity because I understood he is a poor person  living with a never treated neurodivergence because the US healthcare  system sucks ass. So I charged him peanuts like I'm still a budding 15  years old artist from a Country with shit currency.

I  carried on for at least a year, getting literal headaches every time I  had to work on his commissions and parse out the meaning from his  convoluted docs, fully aware that I was taking time from doing things  that I and my audience would have liked.

I've ignored obvious  red flags, like his opinions on "AI" "Art" (you know which type of  opinions) his total blindness to art processes, like emulation and  different rendering, and his obsession over teenage characters. Or the  fact he never commented on the fact that I stopped posting his stuff on  my profile like his subjects were poison for my gallery or something.

Until  one day, a few months ago, weeks after I had already done a piece for  him (two times because he didn't like the position of the arm in the  previous one) for free because it was a Patreon reward, he asked for a  new one because I had been late and it was already time. In the  meanwhile I did for him a commission template to help him skim down the  details of his chimeric characters and conceal his poor English for  other artists. I assumed that it replaced my reward.

I  realized then that he didn't want to support me, or ever understood how  to do that. He wanted an idiot to magic into existence his fantasies  about Ronaldo Fryman and the Sultan from Disney's Aladdin for free.

I  said to him "No, I don't want anymore." And he responded with 40+  messages over the night, and after I read one of them saying "And I even  sticked to your commission template" like he was doing a favor to me  and not the other way around, I popped and I went into a blocking spree,  I went to my Paypal account and sent him the equivalent of six months  of Patreon support. he could have taken it, or given it back, but he did  the worst thing: he gave me back a part of that since the last reward covered a part of that period.

He  just admitted that this was purely transactional. I was his bitch and  he believed he deserved it because he was poor and smart and  misunderstood and won my friendship by asking a lot of unsolicited  questions and made jokes about my personal life.

I'm  sorry, he's certainly a hurting person living with a lot of troubles,  but I've not the power nor the moral obligation to help him. I have to  take care of myself first, of my art and of the adorable husky mutt that  the frozen depths of hell dropped on my lap three months ago.

It  was a long tangent, and I'm sorry if it bored or made uncomfortable  some of you, but now, without the worry of that energy vampire, I feel  more motivated than ever.

Art coming soon.