Desucon and oh oops the comic!

I thought I could make a small post here too about my Desucon weekend. It was good!

We left Jyväskylä a little after three o'clock and got to Lahti in good time; we went to see the unveiling of a Finnish comic anthology Hyi, Homoa!, which contains short stories with gay themes. I bought one because it was funny and a lot of my art friends are in it and the overall quality is great! If you're at all interested you can find the publishing group's page here. The cost is 10 euros which is a really fair price for a niiiice comic book!

Back at the hotel I continued sketching Feral Gentry even though I was dead tired and horrified of the thought of rising at 7am the next morning. But rise we did! I shared a table for the first time with a long-time alley comrade Ered, and on Saturday we both still had enough stuff to make the table organising a bit of a pain in the butt. It's always interesting to observe the flow of buyers at the Artist's Alley; Saturday is usually the better day concerning overall sales, but Sunday is the day people ask for commissions more willingly. it's sometimes very tiring since it might mean that someone comes with more than one commission request at the last minute, but I'm glad they do.

I spent the weekend mostly sitting at the Alley and being very hungry and sloooooowly making progress with the comic when people didn't want to shower me with money. I had good company though, we talked a lot about good series like Mononoke and people seemed to like my solemn asoiaf fanart a lot, but I suspect some people bought it just for the wolf. Not that I mind, I like wolves too! But now I may have to actually take a reprint and that will cost me moneyyy... Well, I think it just might be worth it and I have some other ideas I didn't have time to print last time so it may all be good. :)

There's Jon! and Ghost!

I don't have a lot of pictures to share with you since I really suck at taking any but I at least got a few bad ones of some of the Sunday commissions I drew in roughly 15 minutes of intense concentration.Here I got two out of three hunk commissions  (they came back for more!!), one aptly described "murderer" with wheels on his feet, and a doe person.

And, uhhh... oh yeah, remember to go check the webcomic Feral Gentry tomorrow for a new page! I have it on good standing he might be talking to himself so there's going to be some actual reading. :) I'll be making a proper separate post about the comic a bit later, now that I can actually talk a little about it!

Good Morning Everynyan

I... I guess I should be, like, Finnishnated by now. Mind you I still fail to check the left-hand side of the road when crossing so I've had some, uhh, close calls. I've spent the months after coming home mainly at work training delivering fixings of 2D art for a small game company I've worked for before, some concept art but mainly a huge rework on some more important illustrations. This has led to the regrettable situation where I haven't really had energy to draw stuff outside work.... except for this one project. I have no news on the field of animation but boy am I going to have something to show you in a while! We (or I, perhaps) have finally began serious work on our webcomic! It's still without a name but there's going to be Fair Folk and normal people and lots and lots of plants, and it's going to be beuauiiutiful. I hope. We still need to figure out where to host it since the format is not the most usual one, but it is probably going to be found on Smackjeeves at least to begin with. I am so pumped I'd just rather shove the whole thing here than wait any longer but unfortunately I don't think that would serve any meaningful purpose.

I managed to snatch a table on the Desucon Artists' Alley and am going to be sitting and selling there with another AA friend, Ered. I'm still not completely set on what it is I'm going to be selling this year but I have a couple of ideas... It's just drawing the comic project has been such a big deal I've really had no time to seriously put into working on any of those ideas. :( One or two at least are in a WIP stage rather than not formalised at all, but... yeah. It's hard. My life is hard. I think I want to try including some Trigun this year, I just re-watched the series and besides I never got to try and sell any of the older ones (not inherently a bad thing).

I was in a really bad mood yesterday. I was colouring this lineart I really liked and then suddenly I just got really frustrated over my style of colouring, all the shininess and being slave to the form and making things smooth and nice. I wanted to change and I wanted it NOW. This didn't happen and thus my day progressed in fits of crying naps on the sofa and going back to the computer, sulking at the computer, colouring but only feeling agony and anger, back to the sofa, back to the picture, still feeling awful but still colouring, distracting self with tumblr, flipping layers on and off and so on. I didn't feel so bad waking up this morning but I am still angry at myself for not being able to colour like people whole colours I really like; I want something surreal, painterly, blotchy and messy, but at the same time I'm wondering if anyone would appreciate those qualities in my work. I have a complex over staying inside the lines. And a paradox of resenting textures because they make digital pictures look better if used right.

In conclusion:

The last night

This is really the last one!
I'm sitting in my room again and soon it will not be my room anymore. I think I have all my tickets for the journey back, train ticket, another train ticket and the plane ticket. The life drawing hand-in was today and I think it went okay. I was very glad with my maybe-grade for Pre-Production at least so even if I flunk this I'll have something to show someone.

I still need to vacuum and toss some things to the trash.

I think the exchange here has definitely been one of the best things I've managed to do with my life. I never thought I could really actually have the possibility of landing an animation-related job, but it doesn't seem impossible anymore. I learned so much! I know I said it was terrible but I meant that in the best possible way. I learned.

 It's going to be so cold.

I went and splurged for the last time at AllSaints. It was a good one and I'm not blaming myself for spending that money. And I have my breakfast sandwiches for tomorrow and... damn I've used all my little bottles. Well.  I can handle this. I'll just... I don't know what I'll do. Maybe panic.

Oh Great Britain, how many parts of you I did not yet get to see! I promise I will come back. You are magical. Kisses!!

The Great Last Fortnight

Hello. I guess I went kind of quiet over Christmas. I hope you understand. I worked over the holidays but only on unmoving images, most of which I still haven't scanned. I had the goal of finishing all my domestic figures and figures in environment in that time and there were 22 pictures to do by that list. I'll post some of them later since I obviously need to scan them next week for the hand-in anyway.
Other things I did: backgrounds.
Other other things I did: ............Skyward Sword...

We had two out of three big hand-ins this Thursday, Pre-production and semi-optional Lockdown, and I managed to hand in both! Honestly I thought I couldn't do either of them properly but I'm pretty happy with what I had in the end. I spent a lot of time at school simply because other people were there too and it was kind of fun. You know the kind of fun where you are bleeding from the hand but there are other people in the room and you're all bleeding together! Now I'm freaking out on the thought that maybe I put in the wrong files or forgot something or arrrrghh! Maybe I put them in at the wrong size? Or the wrong version?? Or not at all?!??

Anyway I'm trying to get over that since there really is nothing to do about it and I think I will pass. I think. And I'm particularly happy with my Lockdown work, you know how I mentioned those 1920's moving postcards? Naturally I went for something stupidly laborious which in this case was a lady dancing Charleston across the card and I really thought I might not get it done. But then, you know what I discovered? That actually following the tested ways of doing animation really does make things easier. Like doing the b/w body lineart first... and the clothing AFTER the body and the colours AFTER the body and wow. I don't know if I can show it to you since there is a slight chance it might get into a music video, but after I'm rejected I'll be sure to post it right away!

Well, maybe just a tiny still won't hurt anyone.