I’ve been working on quite a bit both this week and the last, but nothing is as exciting as getting my project pages up! I’m loathe to leave this post as short as a tweet, so let’s do a brief recap of the week.
Art’s Better with Friends
Contrary to popular belief, I am not immune to peer pressure. I just happen to have fewer peers. I have been excitedly awaiting the release of Sky: Children of Light on PC, and the constant chatting with my streamer friends has rekindled my interest in streaming myself. I’ve already got most of the setup for it, so it’s more a matter of restarting, just like art.
It’s been three years since my last stream and I’ve learned quite a lot about what I do and do not like in presentation, as well as what assets are necessary to have a comfortable-looking setup. I’ll need a lot of them, and because I’m particular, I’ll need to make them myself.
This is where the fun begins. I’ve been looking for an excuse to begin learning Blender, as well as get back in the swing of working digitally (I haven’t removed my tablet from its box since I moved into this house over a year ago.). Making Twitch assets will provide a great ramp to both of those goals. Not only do I need emotes and channel panels, but also I want to have complete control over my follow and sub animations- so they match my overlay.
I spent a good chunk of the week playing in Canva to make an overlay concept that I liked.
Did I mention I’m also making my overlay, and since I am not going to steal the work of the great Takehiko Inoue- I’m going to make a comic page to go in the background. Oh, And a PNGTuber to preface my eventual VTuber. And maybe some opening/closing animations. And-
As usual, I’ve got my work cut out for me. Someone should probably take away my scissors.
Remembering my Roots
Working on my imminent Twitch stream has made me consider what I enjoy about creating. I found myself happily planning and plotting out what I’d do next with none of the self-deprecation that’s plagued my art for the past decade.
Part of it is because it’s new. Part of it is because I know I’m bad at it. Most of it is because I don’t have any expectations of excellence. My relationship with Excellence is best explored with a therapist, but suffice to say that it’s a big hang-up for me when it comes to doing anything. If I don’t feel that I’m expected to excel, I can pursue it without issue. Otherwise it’s a near insurmountable task.
Separating my fear of excellence from my art has been a challenge I have yet to defeat by attacking head on, but I may be able to get to it in a roundabout way. I know I’m terrible at non-organic forms like buildings, cars, and robots. I also need a ridiculous amount of those non-organic forms to complete a sci-fi comic.
So why not (re)start there? Finding base models I like will take a lot of iteration before I have something that I can bring to blender for final rendering (there is absolutely no way I’m drawing the pod system by hand every time it appears).
I spent a lot of time in my thINKbook (more on that later) this week doing just that. And against all experience in the last decade, it was fun. It was fun enough that I want to do it again until I get it right. It was fun enough that I remembered I wanted to make comics because writing can’t convey just how cool the pods and other little bits really are.
It’s like remembering where I came from. I missed this, and I hope the feeling stays this time.
fatcr0w is a hobbyist artist with a passion for comics and illustration. They take on too many projects and don’t know when to shut up. It is with great optimism that they believe one day this blurb will be more interesting.
fatcr0w 