Icymasamune

July Patron Reward Poll

 First patreon reward poll go! Because of the time crunch this month the poll will be active until Aug 6th. All poll options are submitted by Gatecrasher tier patrons. 

Because it has been a while: Agrid is the dimensional traveling hero school girl, and in this case manifesting as a cosmoknight from the Rifts tabletop RPG from Palladium games.

Specific details and feedback on your choice are encouraged!

Tower character Design

Happy weekly update day! ok these character design pages are getting bigger all the time. There is a zip file with all of the design work I have done so far on the character attached to this post. Most of this stuff has been posted already as I was working on her design (which I am still not 100% satisfied with).

Tower is going to be the central character on a later NEU comic - the host of a webcast who plays up a persona as a sort of main villain of a show where the cast members compete in va...

Cup UP Cake pencils 2

The remaining pages, 14-19 penciled. The rest have been sent off for inking which means, until coloring time I will be focusing on Shadowlark next week.  I honestly don't have a whole lot to say at this time - the comic is coming together well and I look forward to everyone's reactions to the finished product, hopefully done the beginning of next month.

Reminder!

Sunday is the last day for submissions for the Patreon poll!

Line art and Petra Full Size*

*Petra not fully depicted.

I did this pic as fanart for Zerion of his character "Pettan" (real name Petra) bcause I find her kind of adorable and delightfully absurd. Plus I have a thing for boobwalls. 

There wasn't a whole lot to show this week outside of the comic pages, so I am going to put up a couple of linearts of this and a Barria pic. It's been a pretty Demonesu heavy month largely because I want to get the first NEU comic finished if possible.

There are seven more pag...

July Reward Submissions

OK folks. All $5 and up tier patrons time to start submitting your choices for the Month's Patron Poll. As I mentioned before, time is tight so we only have until 12pm PST on the 22nd to get submissions in.

 You can either comment here or send me a note (whichever you feel most comfortable with). Each Patron at this tier gets to make their own submission choice and it can be as specific or vague as they like, but there are a few restrictions:

1) For the sake of consistency and time ...

Cup UP Cakes pencils

Somehow I managed to make a lot of progress on the pencils for the first NEU comic already. The entire comic has 19 pages plus the cover (so at 12 pages and the cover penciled I am over halfway done). Once I finish the pencils its off to Will for inking and then we will get the colors and lettering hammered out.

On Patreon Vote Subjects

Because this is the first month that I will be trying this patreon vote setup I wanted to make sure I have everything organized ahead of time and will be starting it a little early (official post for Gatecrasher Patrons will be made this weekend along with the weekend post). How it will work is this:

All patrons in the second tier will get to make submissions for the vote (again, ALL patrons get to vote, it's the second tier that choose the subjects to vote on). It's possible (even likely) tha...

Bunnyfull

(Lineart attached)

Barria is a NEU's resident Anxiety-tan. I don't want to go into too much detail until her introduction in the comics, but she is a young writer with a lot of intense interests and social anxieties. The two are definitely connected.

I honestly spent the day working on this to unwind some stress after spending most of the week focused on patreon format, research, financial matters, and some obligate work. I had planned on doing real work today also but instead thi...

June Art Dump and Gosh-

Gosh it was a bad month for me performance-wise. I backslid a lot on comic due to complications with the old broken-head noodle. But was able to turn it around the last week of the month to get some commissions in to at least salvage some of it. So in the end I have a pretty solid art dump for the month anyways. And a important lesson about backlog for the comic. Hopefully July will see a strong return for Shadowlark now that things are feeling a little better all around.

The bad weeks ...

Cupup roughs and Summer Maid layers

I could have sworn I actually shared some of these before, but seeing as I just edited the pages to change Naomi's hair, I thought I could post the sketches for the first couple pages of the BE comic I am working on with Will Muzzi. Also posting the layers for the Naomi summer maid outfit for this week. Hopefully once I complete my commission obligations I can get both BE comics and Shadowlark going this next week. I'd hate to delay again but it's been a rough time still.

As always; any...

Character Design: Inventor

A premise for a sort of antagonist/rival of Candice and Naomi in the NEU setting. While I was working on her design she started to bring up memories of the character Nyx from my old Poisonwind stuff and I kind of started to lean into that. That Nyx memory is honestly why I am pretty attached to the lavender hair, but I need to give alternatives a chance just in case something looks better.

Going with a sort of false necromancer concept in her technology: very pirate and skull themed mec...

May 2018 Art Dump

Kind of a mixed bag of work in progress and junk sketches to go with the finished work this month. I am going to have to replace my scanner so I can start including my sketchbook pages along with these artdumps at some point.

Shadowlark Ch. 1, Pg. 5

Ugh finally. Now back to the rest of this chapter.

Possibly make a few more corrections or edits before it goes up on Friday, but that's always how it goes.

Naomi redesign

Not  a whole lot extra to accompany this; but this means I need to redraw some stuff from my current comic projects.

Yeah the floof will be missed (though I plan on having her wear a wig for her part time job that resembles her old hairstyle somewhat), but this look fits her character much more and I feel works better for her. I also think her human version will bleach her hair to the same white/silver as her minos counterpart, though I am glad I tested other colors - changing hair...

Early Page, progress (again)

skipping two weeks is bad but at least Ill be able to hit the ground running on Friday at this rate. The page still needs shading and I have to go back over the dialogue again to clean it up.

Page Five Lineart and Update

To share my pain and frustration: so this page introduces some things I needed to get out of the way early on so I wouldn't sabotage myself later (basically things that I saw being a problem in the script). So When I put this page together I didn't have the best idea of flow and format ahead of time - which made it incredibly difficult to put together. It's honestly a very simple page but I was having the hardest time getting it to look dynamic or visually appealing while still serving it's p...

Fanservice

I still like this idea but I feel like there is a better way for me to handle it visually. So thinking about abandoning this and starting over with a more dynamic panel format.

Goofy Barria stuff.

Barria Design progress

A very self indulgent character I tinkered with over the course of a couple of weeks and then spent an entire day (Saturday) working on design for. In the end she has wound up being the character design I am most satisfied with - which tells me some of my earlier designs are probably rushed and would use a similar treatment.

Barria will likely appear in the Nexus AU fetish comics as a background cahracter but mostly she exists for my own entertainment alone. 

I jokingly (lovi...

Candy Relax Layers

The funny thing is how much I hated working on this one and felt it was kind of garbage all the way through. Later in the month I am honestly pretty happy with how it turned out.

Shadowlark Page 4

Early post of this week's page

Need to start on the roughs for the next batch of pages this week between commissions and other projects. But overall happy with the way this turned out.

My main concern is always readability in Shadowlark. I really hate having to rely on exposition to get across ideas - and prefer to convey events visually or with context: limiting dialogue to what feels natural for the scene.

SLS Page 3 (Also May commissions open)

Cutting it kind of close this week already. Which tells me I need to make sure I have a healthy head start before I do more than one page a week. I also have been trying to gear up for commissions for May.  While I work on a formal post for social media: Ill open up a few slots for character illustrations, and patreons always get priority (as usual!).

April Art Dump!

Putting the art dump in a couple days early this month because my current sinks won't get done before Monday (and I like to make sure to get the art dumps in during weekends if possible so people can grab them if they wont be able to stick around another month).

Most of what is up this time is concept sketches. A lot of my work and time was invested into Shadowlark script and thumbnails this month, which set a good foundation for that going forward, but means there was very little subst...

SLS ch1 p2

Lets shoot for a Friday update schedule!

SLS Ch1 p2-4 lines

I think page four is my favorite page I have ever drawn.

Going to work on colors and text tomorrow and decide on update schedule. Thinking about Fridays, so if I finish up page 2 on time that could work easily...

SLS Page 1 preview

I will be attempting to post pages in advance here for patrons though the first page will be going up tomorrow (Saturday). Progress and such for pages also. While I have gone back and forth with myself on tiers for patrons for how early you can see pages I am mostly sticking to just letting everyone see the full content I post here regardless of donation. I don't want to make any changes to that until I have a lot more feedback from you guys so I can make sure I'm not upsetting the people tha...

Cover final and layers

Bam.

SLS Chapter One Cover (color)

Still not positive about my ideas for text on the cover, but overall happy with the way it's coming together.

Chapter Cover Thumbnail

It's taking me a while to come up with a cover idea I like for the first chapter "The Witch, The Hunter, and the Beast".

Shadowlark Chapter One Thumbnails

First Pass at thumbnails for Chapter One. Generally I try to get as close to 20 pages per chapter as I can, with a minimum of 16. 18 feels a little small considering how much set up is going to happen in the first chapter (already it feels like it might be a bit rushed or cramped). I considered doing a revis...