General Life/Art Update

A lot's been going on lately, so I feel like I should fill you guys in on it. To start things off, I've swapped drawing traditionally recently. Or in other words, I've been drawing on real paper/canvas with real tools, not staring at an LCD screen with 50 social media apps open and spamming me with notifications. 

There's a couple of reasons for the change. It's mostly aesthetic, as I just like the look and feel of traditional art over digital, I always have. (Heck, my digital process was already purposefully close to how I'd need to handle things traditionally.) There's something special about the amount of line control you can get (or the lack of control with painting and similar media), the randomness of paper grain, and just being able to have the original piece physically in front of you, instead of an abstract plane of pixels on a screen. 

Of course, this change will be extending to Gunwhale, and I'll begin drawing it traditionally starting with Chapter 4. To be honest, I always intended for Gunwhale to be drawn traditionally, to the point where most of the traditional materials I have now are ones I bought back in February/March 2021, when I was initially drafting Gunwhale. I kept going with this well into June or July with the early concept artwork, however I wasn't confident enough in my ability to do two pages a day traditionally, and ended up scaling it back to digital.

(Early Dotte drawing, done with a Pentel Pocket Brush + Crayola Color Pencils. Longtime patrons may also remember the old tier artworks, which were drawn the same way.)

On top of that, though, it helps me stay focused on drawing, while not ruining my eyes as much as my Cintiqs have. (I have terrible eyesight now, that only developed after I began using screen tablets for art.) Something strange I've also noticed is that I can scan traditional art at ludicrously high resolutions (600dpi-1200dpi) yet only get 20mb-50mb files, which is really nice. I've also down scaled my PC setup in general, removing a monitor just because it felt too overbearing. I don't really like sitting at my PC, nor do I really use it anymore for anything beyond work, so it didn't feel worth having such a ridiculous setup.

To be completely honest though, I've been incredibly stressed out for the past week, and will likely be stressed for the next few months. Reason being, I'm finally trying to get my driver's license, and I'm totally nerve wrecked about driving. This is probably mostly due to growing up in Detroit, where everyone was a terrible driver. (Not to mention, being in one or two major accidents) I'm not sure if my mood will smooth out or what, I expect things will settle down once I get a consistent practice schedule going and become more confident, but I dunno. For what it's worth, my dad is also coming up to visit sometime soon (hopefully), so that'll also cut into my time a bit.

For now, I'm just going to focus all my efforts on Gunwhale, since it's something that's easy for me to think about and focus on. I was going to try doing a few commissions this month and getting some prints out, but I don't really feel comfortable with that kind of work yet. (Since I'm still kind of green when it comes to traditional, and just generally not being in the right mindset for online stuff right now.)

So yeah, if anyone's been wondering why I haven't been on the Discord server much lately, this all is pretty much why, and I've been making more of an effort to be less terminally online in general. (My Steam Deck also finally came in, as you can see in one of the pics above, making my PC even more irrelevant lol) Chapter 4 of Gunwhale should start soon, maybe sometime this week, though I'm only going to aim for one page a day at first.

I wasn't really happy with Chapter 3 visually, so I'm going to aim for something like Chapter 1's look for Chapter 4. Though, I may or may not do the manga-style halftones. Will probably focus more on pure B&W, like Dragonball or something, since it's what I have access to with traditional medias. If it works out, I'll look into getting some alcohol or waterbased greyscale markers to use for Chapter 5, bringing it back to Chapter 2's look. (I would just do the greys digitally, but it really hurt my wrist due to how much pressure digital painting brushes take.)

Anyway, thanks for reading, and if you wanna chat or w/e and I'm not online on Discord, feel free to hit me up on Telegram instead, since I've more or less switched to that for my main DM app.