Midsummer Madness

Unlike these previous weeks, there is no theme tying this week’s blogpost together. Simply put, I don’t have any major project to show off from this last week of work. My time has mostly been split between all the usual things; editing, querying agents (as much as it kills me), doing art, streaming, and making a mess of my kitchen. Clearly, I have things that are in the works, but they just aren’t ready to be shown off yet, but maybe soon! Given all of that, I figured that this week would be a great week to do a generic set of updates related to the site and what I’ve been working on behind the scenes, so let’s jump into it!

Digital Art

Clearly this has been a topic a few times in the most recent posts, and it’s going to be a topic going forward into the foreseeable future. We recently got past our 4th of July weekend which gave me a whole 4 days to work on stuff in peace and quiet, and with GDQ going on, I had more than enough free time to split between watching that and arting. With my long weekend, I was able to spend a lot of time trying to improve my art skills. I’m definitely still a complete novice in terms of many, many things, but for each of these projects I complete, I find new ways to go about the art process, making it much easier for me to do future projects. It’s been kind of fun to actually see myself learning different things as time goes on, especially when some lesson I learned on a previous project comes back around to help me! Since I had a lot of freetime, I was able to experiment with multiple art styles, some of which were shown here on the website, and some that found a home on twitter!

The first big piece was none other than a rendition of the Karasi where I clearly demonstrated… my lack of skill. It definitely didn’t turn out as great as Vargoth did, and I believe it has two reasons for that. Number one, I chose a desert as my first landscape project. A freakin desert… I have no idea what I was thinking, but the Karasi is a location in the book that is literally a hellscape of sand and that is entirely it! The Karasi sucks in every sense of the word, so I’m not sure why I thought that would be a smart thing to start with. The second thing that held the piece back was simply my own pitiful skills. From that piece, you can clearly see that I fought a tree and lost when it came around to trying to make it look good. It looks more like something I would have made in college, so… yeah, bit of a swing and a miss there, but at least the piece still gives some face to the Karasi! It is nice to see pieces of my book get the chance to shine in broad daylight, and it taught me many valuable lessons related to proper layering, texturing techniques, and highlighting, some of which worked and some of which didn’t.

The landscape piece wasn’t my only project, obviously! I also dipped a toe into lineart and made a comic that did surprisingly well on the twitter verse, which was a nice refresher. This was another project where I was able to learn some lessons, but I’m still having trouble figuring out how to properly draw animals, specifically my fennecs. It turned out decently well, but I have a long way to go when it comes to defining a process for doing line work.

Last on my list of digital art pieces is something new that hasn’t been seen yet. Since making my book, I knew from the beginning how the world looked, and I sketched it out many times over the period of my life. However, I never thought I had the skills to bring it to life in a map that people could enjoy looking at, let alone interact with. With the success of my other digital art projects however, I decided to give it a shot, and my GOD is it taking FOREVER to finish. I’m over ten hours into this thing and I’m not even sure I’ve hit the fifty percent mark yet! Who knew making a map would take so freakin long! That being said, it is coming along well, and, once again, I’m learning lessons about layering and how to do certain things, so it’s turning out to be a great learning lesson. In fact… have a sneak peak!

So, this map is something I’m hoping to give life to in a unique way on the website. I want to get it finished and then give it its own page here where users would be able to click around on it and get detailed descriptions and possibly even images of different locations across Sapphiria’s homeworld! I’m not honestly sure I can figure out how to do that coding wise, but it’s a very exciting idea I think! At the very least, expect the map to make a formal appearance either next week or the week after. I’m not making any promises beyond that for it, but I will at least promise that my digital art journey is far from over, and that everyone’s favorite intrepid duo, Sapphiria and Atom, might be making an appearance soon after it’s done!

Short Update for Short Stories

Two things I want to cover on the short story front this week. Number one, I am firmly aware the viewer for the short stories sucks. I wanted to do it a different way, but I couldn’t figure out how with the tools that squarespace offers. That being said, I’m working on sniffing out a solution, so stay tuned for a Short Story revamp to have the form be easier to read!

Second… A new chain of short stories might be on the way! With the completion of the Karasi piece, I feel very inspired to work on truly short stories for the different areas of Sapphiria’s world. These stories would only be 6 pages a piece, and each one would be more or less describing brief experts from an explorer in her people’s history. There won’t be a weekly commitment for these or anything like that, but it’s something to add a bit of extra spice to the website and put more life alongside my art pieces, so keep an eye out for that at some point!

Twitch

Twitch is going reasonably well for me and I at least want to include an update on it. I am very aware that my stream and layout are both very barebones, but I intend to fix that very soon with multiple changes! As soon as this weekend, I will start working on both a background layout for the stream as well as header cards for the description section to provide interesting links to both twitter, my website, an about me page, and whatever else I can think of. Additionally, I am planning to bring a webcam online very soon because I know people like watching reaction, so keep an eye out for that either next week or the week after.

Site Updates

There isn’t too much to report on this front. As I stated earlier, I am planning to add an interactive map section to the website at some point, but it’s not anything scheduled to roll out anytime soon. I am also looking to revamp some of the colors and art assets used across the website, and I want to see about updating the about me page to be more robust. Stay tuned for more info.

3d Modeling

This will be taking a back seat for a while now that both the UEC and Sapphire Eye are taken care of. I have more designs that I want to bring to life, but, alas, I am one dude, and I have only two hands. All of the other stuff mentioned so far is higher priority, so, for the time being, this will be waiting in the back for a new dawn. That being said, depending on what stories end up getting made first, there might be more 3d assets prioritized in the near future!

Final Thoughts

That covers pretty much everything I can think to mention for this week. Like I said, not a whole lot of updates, but I hope that the next few weeks have a bit more excitement to them! I think this map will be super neat once its done, and I’m ready to give my stream a facelift. For now, that’s all I have to talk about for once, so now it’s time for me to begin preparing the weekly stream! To those of you who read this regularly, thank you! Knowing there’s at least a few people out there reading these things each week really helps with my motivation, and makes me feel like this effort really can succeed! Until next time, cheers!

The Flying Fennec