Tearna in the Southern Isles!
New Wednesday, who dis? No, but seriously, we’re back with another weekly blog, and this time I bring art! Let’s hop into it!
Tearna and the Feesh!
The piece that I’ve been working on is none other than Tearna going for a swim in the exotic and tropical Southern Isles! Behold!
So, yes, this piece didn’t actually do what I originally intended. My goal for it when I began was to not use black lines at all, but… I realized halfway through the piece that I’m just not someone who can do that. My brain wasn’t trained for a lack of black lines, at least not for characters, so I ended up going back on my original plan and had to redesign this piece to include black lines, hence why it took so freaking long to come out. But, that doesn’t mean it was a failure by any means!
In this piece, Tearna is swimming through the Southern Isles and doing what she does best. Explore! She has just leapt off the galleon her expedition chartered and quickly found herself face to face with a school of rather odd, blue fish, fish who are just as curious about her as she is of them!
Tearna’s outfit is her typical swimwear, and I did my best to make the goggles look like actual, reflective goggles. My biggest pain point starting off on this piece, however, was the water surface. I have never done surface water before, so I had to learn from scratch the best way to give the illusion of ripples and waves. Eventually, I figured out a way to make it look sorta like the real thing, at least enough for me to feel like it was good enough!
The next part I went to war against was… fur! Fur has been a MASSIVE pain point for a long, LONG time, but I think I finally started to crack the code! After seeing a few other art pieces on Bluesky, I finally realized I needed more of a flowing, curved style in order to really emulate fur, and it needed to come to a sharp point. Highlighting part of the fur also helped really make it pop, and I think that’s best shown by Tearna’s ear fluff! I still have more I need to learn, but it’s a massive step in the right direction!
What I ultimately learned from this piece, however, is that I really need to focus on my line art. My shading and highlights are ok, but my line art is definitely my weak point. Considering how I started off with pixel art to get most of these concepts, my failures with line art doesn’t surprise me. So, what does that mean? Well, I’ve already started work on my next art piece, and this one is going to be… lines! Nothing but lines! No color, no shading stuff. Just lines to see if I can learn how to effectively bring my ideas to life in a way I can be proud of! So, this next piece will be none other than a comic panel detailing a scene from the Sapphire Verdict’s first chapter! If you wanted to see a bit of the Sapphire Verdict, here’s your chance!
Speaking of which…
Let’s talk about the Sapphire Verdict
Recently, my last round of cutting was completed and removed around 190,000 more words from the book. That’s fantastic! The problem is, I’m still sitting at 375,000 words, and I’ve learned some more things this week that has caused quite the panic attack in me. From snooping around forums and hearing testimonials from both editors and agents alike, the recommended 125,000 words count for a sci-fi fantasy novel is more like a hard cap rather than a suggestion, which I never new. That means I’m WAY off, and while it sounds like I should be able to cut down by another 200,000 easily if you follow the trend of my cuts… we’re at the point where content is having to be cut. Even from my own experimenting, it’s not going to be easy, so… I’m kinda stuck, and more than a little lost.
Basically, I appear to have three options. A) Struggle to edit it down myself. B) Pay a ridiculous amount of money to have someone else do it. C) Write something else entirely and hope to god it can help me get my foot in the door to get some help.
Truthfully, I don’t know what the right decision is, and I don’t exactly have anyone to consult. I’ve got a tentative plan, but, as of this moment… the Sapphire Verdict is in a position that scares me. Hopefully I can figure out what I should be doing at some point this week, but hopefully I can come back in a week or two with good news.
Stream Stuff
Ark is finally starting to burn me out. Their recent fiasco with the Ai generated trailer and, let’s be frank, complete failure with Aquatica absolutely killed my enthusiasm for the game, and now I feel like I’m going through the motions and nothing else. Thus, I am probably going to be making a switch both on Youtube and on Twitch here soon. I want to break more into the speedrunning games I’ve been interested in for a while, so I’m probably to be doing more Pikmin, LTTPR, Pikmin 2, and potentially some other gamecube games. I’m also working on more games with friends videos, so expect my channel to kinda become more of a variety thing than it was before. Ark content will still continue to leak out, but it definitely isn’t going to be quite the pace it was before. That being said, Crystal Isles starts next week, so look forward to the beginning of a new misadventure!
Conclusion
That’s it for this week. I’ve got a LOT of stuff I’m working on, and a lot more that I need to work on that I can’t quite get to. For now, I’m going to head off and see if I can’t get more knocked off my To Do list, so, until next time… Cheers!
The Flying Fennec