Progress Report, 16/07 - 21

Hello everyone and welcome to a brief progress report!

The schedule responsible for brutalizing this Monday has largely continued, but I've manged to get some stuff sorted regardless. The Convict for instance has had several scenes added to it, bloating the project beyond initial proportions, where I might actually require a more ambitious scene setup than in-game footage to make transitions between scenes more smooth. I am half of a mind to animate Shepard and the Warden walking to the cell in question, talking along the way, with short, intense cuts to Jack doing her thing, but it remains to be seen if that is feasible or not - ever the learning experience, this is.

When time is sparse, posing scenes and scene building is the most common matter I tend to put my spare hours into, this because I find that animating in short bursts inevitably makes you lose track of your work progress, messes with work flow, and you'll end up tearing your hair out when you realize you've missed animating something or there's clipping in the final render since no notes in the world can easily convey where to be mindful of potential issues arising. Maintaining a work document of each animation in a bid to animate it an hour or so at a time per day would in itself be an undertaking that would take time too, which I simply do not have more. As such, paradoxically perhaps, it tends to be times like these, when I have little time to animate, where most of my new project ideas tend to arise - simply sitting in the program, posing and testing out models, makes the creativity flow and gets you motivated to create more, while at the same time being a low-stake endeavor since whatever doesn't pan out can simply be discarded, having never been meant to be anything beyond experimentation in the first place.

As such, finding myself drawn over and over to a particularly demanding model in our lineup, I've endeavored to try making a small Wonder Woman centered comic. It's highly experimental so far, but will give me the necessary experience for panel layouts, speech and narration bubble setups, etc, in order to make my Warcraft comic down the line. It'll be short, sweet, and quite down to the point (her prostitution getup being a focus), but it'll get the job done and, hopefully, be enjoyable in turn. More on this in the near future, as the scene posing itself for the panels is, at least in the moment, seemingly almost finished. You never know what more panels you need, in the end, and this is a great way to figure out how to plan out the work flow for something that actually is feasible to create in shorter bursts, over the course of days.

Incidentally, the Samara-centered 9K twitter follower celebration wallpaper should be up this weekend, though we're now closing in on 9.5k already, which is pretty damn insane. I will have to consider what to do for 10.000 followers, and wouldn't mind suggestions in the comments if people have ideas :)

Commissions are still underway, if slowly. Again, my apologies for taking so long with them. Once I finish these I will simply not take on anything that I feel I cannot deliver in a timely manner as I feel a genuine stress over having people wait for their slots for so long - while no money has exchanged hands, it's still not nice to have been promised a commission opportunity only to have to wait for literal months to hear back from the creator. It's terribly rude, it's not congruent with how I want to treat backers or people in general, and it's a needless source for frustration for all parties involved. I have issues as a person, not only on here, with trying to propitiate people and ending up taking on more work than I can handle, which can end up detrimental to both me and the person I'm trying, in effect, to make happy. I endeavor to reel myself in here and not let that be the case, as good as can be, in the future, even if that means some severe limitations to commission work.

Thank you, as always, for your continued support and for all of your kind words! While the heat is coming down on us in full force the stores at least have had the sense this year to stock up properly on fans, so we're keeping it at bay as good as possible. Hopefully you're doing alright out there, and are looking forward to the Ivy piece for this Monday. I hope to give it a lot of extra love this weekend, when my job is finally off my back.

Take care of yourselves, and each other!
/DH