It's almost March! Since we're in an election year, I've had the fun project of researching my primary options and voting this month, as well as had some dental work redone, and will be diving into the equally-fun project of sales and income taxes next. Thank you massively to the folks who've been reading and leaving nice comments on the comic, checking out my store, and hopping on the Patreon. Every bit of encouragement makes a huge difference right now and helps keep me going through all the less-than-fun tasks.
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Behind the scenes: Magic, Masquerades and Desperados
Development sketches along various stages of my Magic, Masquerades and Desperados pack, which released for Patrons this month! The Masquerade and Western pieces were a great opportunity to look up references and environments I don't get to draw much! For both, I drew some initial concepts first, then developed out more complex details I wanted to include (like Cioara's fancy masks and Sheriff Sydney's gunblade) in other spaces to trace over later. You can subscribe on my YouTube to see the timelapse videos of me working on these over the next couple weeks.
Speaking of video, I've been chatting with my more technologically-knowledgeable friends to get some much-needed upgrades, which will hopefully address the GPU errors and crashes and let me try more types of videos for showing off my favorite art and chatting about the things I'm doing. It is pretty amazing what I can do on my phone and with Clip Studio's timelapse tools alone, and I'm having a lot of fun posting them around YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
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Behind the scenes: Trading Cards!
The Screen Tones community is organizing a Trading Card exchange for folks meeting up at various conventions. I just reserved my plane tickets for TCAF in May, so I put together some fun designs to print and trade there too! It's a bit of a challenge fitting all my love for my characters onto one small card, so I'm going to have a reduced version on hand, but it was still lots of fun and good to draw some nice clear references of my favorite outfits for the main characters!
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What I'm watching
The Percy Jackson series was intriguing to watch, since it'd been so long since I'd read the books. I've been thinking a lot about how hard it is to condense something big into a limited episode form, and how we lose opportunity to meet the characters or enjoy their moments together when they're rushing from plot point to plot point. It wasn't too bad in this case, and I like that they kept the humorous tone of all these Greek mythological figures' various creative ways of getting around in modern society.
Wonka was a movie that I wasn't expecting to feel much about, and almost felt like I was going to be bracing myself for lots of those "Wink Wink Remember This?" references and nudges. But I really enjoyed it! It had a good sort of humor that felt a lot like A Series of Unfortunate Events to me (lots of extremely ridiculous villains/over-the-top whimsical schemes but everyone in the series treats them as deadly serious). There was also an emotional sincerity in Willy Wonka's character that was a refreshing interpretation for me.
Ratatouille was another movie that I wasn't expecting to feel much about, but I did... in the opposite way. There could have been a message that the status quo was the stiff-five-star-French restaurant culture and everyone was afraid to challenge that until an American kid came in with his own ideas, but you literally had the sous-chef making goofy corn dog mascots out of the brand. You could have had a message about parental pressure and filling someone's shoes, but they chose to make Linguini's most prominent aspect his manipulability, so it never felt like there were any real stakes that I was rooting for him to overcome. There were a lot of not-very-hard opportunities I saw to tie the arcs of Remy and Linguini together, or to talk about practice vs. talent, individualism vs. collaboration, and I'm shocked they didn't take them. Instead, the message under it all seemed to be "there are special talented geniuses in unexpected places that need the opportunity to show what they can do, and everyone else is just sort of in the way of that."
Treasure Planet was another movie that I wasn't expecting to feel much about... and I didn't. Oh well.
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That's about it for this month! I will close out my thoughts with a haiku about a random item in my store:
Know your alignment
Be Lawful or Chaotic
But never Boring
(inspired by: Know Your Alignment prints)
