#buenissimo | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

dashawfrostart · 2 months ago

Text

This Week In... My Art #23: "Rebuild Of DeviantArt Gallery: You Can (Not) Unsee" 🤣 And The Clean Cut Editions Are Underway!

As indicated in the previous post, I needed to finish a particular task, so, sadly or not, today's post is not really going to be dedicated to "Time & Again" completely. But that's something important that I wanted to let you know about, as well. Well, no more suspense: let's go!

I'm totally moving in the opposite direction in order to go ahead 🤣 It might sound very ironic and counterproductive at first sight, BUT! It works, and it works fast, and that's exactly what I need. I've already wrote earlier about my rocky and tedious path towards optimizing "Time & Again" for physical printing. Now, to make a proper E-release on Itch and GlobalComix as it's supposed to be (as intended, let's say), I'm doing the opposite thing: I'm cutting the full bleed area off to return it back to the proper ratio and cut off the excessive art outside the actual page! Ha-ha! Just in case if you're wondering why I do it this way: that is because all the additions and changes for the "Clean Cut Edition" have been produced on the pages already with the full bleed area included, 100% ready for printing. But for the e-editions, full bleed area is not needed, because it's not included in the final product anyway (and not intended to be there). So as simple as it is: cutting it off again. Magic. As you might've guessed, removing parts is significantly easier than adding them. In fact, with the magical "Export Layers" plugin I praised highly in the previous post, the task was a matter of merely a few clicks.

Here's the window of that absolutely wonderful plugin that everybody should have installed for their layers export procedures☝. Simple, flexible, with the option to ignore invisible layers (that is super important, to me for sure!), with no clutter and unnecessary useless settings. Buenissimo 😁

So the optimization of e-version of the Clean Cut Editions goes very quick. In fact, I have already reassembled the PDFs that are ready to be shipped on Itch ALREADY are on Itch (I started writing the post earlier, so some information was outdated)😁🥳. But the last two files still need a tiny wee bit of work, so - very soon!

As I have already mentioned (very) long ago, the legacy editions are no longer accessible. They're now history. I still have older, unedited versions on GlobalComix, but that will get fixed very soon, as well. Visit again, say, in October. I also want to express special gratitude to my awesome day job coworker Julianne who inspired me to finish what I started doing earlier on GlobalComix to improve the readers' experience! That was a brilliant idea! Thank you, my friend!!!

Now, after a HUGE preamble that is absolutely typical for my unbearable style of writing - finally, onto the main topic of today's post! 🥳 In the last post I only teased you, but now it's no longer a secret, AND the title of this post pretty much revealed it: I was working on a complete overhaul of my DeviantArt gallery. Is it a grand reopening?.. No, not really. No way, actually. Are you invited and expected to visit my gallery?.. Well, you kinda are, but I also doubt it's gonna be a lot of fun to anyone. I already stated my awkward dissatisfaction with the way things work on DeviantArt, so I took down the links to it on my social pages, and I don't provide a link to it on my landing page either. As intended by me, I still keep it for archival purpose and plan on slowly uploading newer artworks in case I want to use them/link to them elsewhere in the internet. But it urgently needed a cleanup, for in it initial state, it was nothing but trash. As in, "Be gone with you! You'll spoil my focus". (truth be told, it's not really relevant to what I was writing about; I just really wanted to make a Dark Souls reference here, lol) I remember quite a few years ago, due to changes on the servers (most likely), the quality of the uploaded art has dropped significantly on DeviantArt. So I had to reupload a lot of stuff in order to repair the files to restore their past glory for the new (and returning) visitors. Seems like something like that happened yet again. There was more though. Due to my artworks being continuously stolen and reuploaded on random websites without my permission, I used to stamp them all with my email and socials, and at times I could upload the artwork in truly god awful quality/resolution intentionally, to prevent people wanting to steal and reupload them, especially without a credit. ... so let's be honest here: if AI is stealing, then people are equally thieves as well, fair and square 😁 ... Needless to say that, within these 15 years 18 years (my math has failed me 😱😫), a lot has changed. Of course, my email has been non-existent for an eternity. Of course, I wanted to add more proper and WORKING social links on my artworks so that the honest admirers of my colourful hobby could find me again and contact me to say thanks like they usually do, if need be. And to give a proper credit, too. So pretty much my entire collection needed to be restamped with the updated social links and with my long dead email removed for good. So this is what I have done. 135 artworks have been restamped. And at this point of time, they're all reuploaded, in high quality (saved as PNGs). Now, the brand new uploads - 77 artworks that almost no one has seen up to this day - have to be uploaded sometime, too. But that will be a story for another day, for the main collection has been updated successfully. That is beside my "Time & Again" content, of course.

Take a look (at a screenshot of a random page on my "Featured" subsection of the gallery, because that will do for a show off, lol):

It is important to mention though that I made a decision to watermark all my coloured artworks. Why?.. The reasons are stated above. Crudely put: because effing people effing steal s**t 🤦‍♀️. Pardon me dirtymouthing (Lothar sure affects me rather negatively), but that's the shortest and cleanest explanation I could come up with👍😁. But from now on I will be able to happily provide links to my old hilarious artworks when I need it, especially when I make more jokes in my blog posts, LOL.

Now, finally! About "Time & Again"!!!

As mentioned above, the "Clean Cut Edition" PDFs for Chapters 1, 2, and 3.1 have already made it to their respective pages on Itch. Chapter 3.2 needed a partial rework of the bonus materials, as I figured. At this point of time, it's all done; it only needs to be stitched together as a PDF.

As for Chapter 4 though... There's an interesting situation. At some point of time for some reason I was worried to make chapters too long. I didn't really aim to make them all absolutely uniform - although I know from the science of art that chapters that are more or less equal in size are generally more appreciated. And still, I tried to keep them within a certain limit. So I ended up cutting out some content. But with the release of psychotic Chapter 5 that, as stated in the previous post, broke all the possible boundaries of panels per page count as well as ethics (the latter is mentioned beside the point, of course), the previous requirement of a page count limitation has become... significantly less significant. So it was decided to restore the cut content for Chapter 4, also to boost the understandability of the whole story - because in the initial release, the interconnections were possibly even more vague than in the Dark Souls series 😱. I hate it when the creators take their readers for simpletons and spell out the story twists loud and clear. That is NOT my approach in storytelling. I want to make my stories into puzzles, easy or not quite, be it with an abundance of hints or with a remarkable lack of them. But they definitely shouldn't be superflat - yup, just like that mode in Minecraft that Jeanny referred to in Chapter 3.

I added 2 extra pages to Chapter 4: some artworks have been reused, some are totally new and made from scratch, and one of them has been torn apart and reassembled anew. Since the extra pages expanded the release by a little bit, I also decided to completely change the bonus materials featured in that chapter, too.

That one is still one of my favourite artworks featured in Chapter 4. ☝ It's somewhat eerie.

As for the extra artworks...

Everyone who had practiced drawing for a long time probably noticed that, over time, little by little, your style is undergoing visible transformations. A part of me doesn't like to return back to the older material to make corrections and/or additions, for the integrity of the result might suffer - since my art style has changed, and it has acquired tendencies towards peculiar elements of design that were not present in the older works. In this case, the addition was somewhat necessary, so I had to brace myself and go forward, to achieve what I wanted. I opened one of the pages from Chapter 4 to use as a reference, to see what I should - and should not - do. It is a bit of a tedious process, to try to imitate your own art style from the last year 😅... But it seems I did just fine.

At this point of time, only a petty little speech bubble is left to modify for Chapter 4, and that's it. My editor should also return the proofread file of the "Notes, Commentary & Hints" section, for there's a lot of text in it.

So, in short - it is going forward. And it's very good. After all the polishing, after all the extra work related to DeviantArt, I'm looking forward to get to work on Chapter 6 relatively soon - be warned though, that this, indubitably, will be the darkest, the crudest, and the most ethically questionable chapter of all. Here you thought that Lothar cannot fall any lower than in Chapter 5?.. Hah, well you underestimated his despicable talents. Oops, spoilers.Also, quite possibly it will be the most boring chapter. To some people.

Time to wrap it up for today. See you, hopefully sooner than later! 👋

P.S. I need extra inspirations. Usually, when in need of inspirations, I play videogames. But alas, I do not do that very well lately... It's getting awfully close to Halloween - and I've only finished 5 Doom mods at best; still never finished Abysm 2: Infernal Contract even though I started playing it last year (dear goodness! pathetic 😑). And almost all the latest Doom mods I've played don't suit my current demand/mood, so I simply drop playing. The latest and the funnest Doom mod discovery for me so far was Ante Mortem - I've never played mods with Supercharge yet, so that's the first time for me. Although a bit too exaggeratedly tomato paste saturated, I appreciated the weapon system overhaul, and the designs in general. A little self proclaimed baby modder might learn a myriad of things from that masterpiece. Very excited about Hands of Necromancy 2... for the reason unbeknownst to me, for I hardly even started playing the first one and not yet ready to return back to it. Eh. Although Psychonauts 1 really entertains me now, even though I don't have time to play if often enough - because somebody keeps working on art stuffs almost all their spare time. But I guess there's still hope for me yet 😁 However, playing Dark Souls 2 (without the SOTFS suffix) and role-playing Daniel and Lothar in the game has proven to be a giant bag of purest fun! RPing your own children always brings a weird extra layer of satisfaction to any game that starts with character creation. My Code Vein adventures prove that 120%.

... Wait a minute, I hear somebody in the crowd asking who Daniel is. You don't know?! Well... I'm sure you will start seeing that old man often enough quite soon 😉

I wonder what's gonna happen to my psyche once I seriously invest all my spare time into the development of Chapter 6... That's gonna be fun, indeed 😁😅

#This Week In Time And Again #TimeAndAgainbyDWF

0 notes