#scripted my next MerMay page

[mossypidder]

Finally got around to painting this concept I’ve had floating around for a few months. This is Enya’s mom, Briony. (Above the water is her human form, below the water is her true form) Honestly really happy with how it turned out, especially since I haven’t properly water colored in about a million years, but yeah. Here she is.

Also, here’s where you can find her playlist and moodboard (just really like her playlist and everything I’ve scrounged up for it)

[animatedaf]

Another 12 months of animatin', illustratin' and video creatin' in the can! This was another pretty stacked year for freelance work and building up my YouTube channel. Read on for more details on each month!

January:

The year kicked off with the release of What a Waste, which I animated at the end of last year. I created a poster to celebrate it's launch.

I also had some artwork in print via an article in LeftLion magazine!

I also illustrated my OC Drillbot ReV for the year of the rabbit and put out a new animation showreel.

February:

I did a valentines card for CherryT of the pair of us in Mario & Luigi style. I was also commissioned to do an edit of the van animation I did last year, this time with a car and some other minor tweaks.

March:

At the start of this month I hit over 1000 subscribers on YouTube, only took 17 years! To celebrate I put together a quick video talking about the past, present and future of the channel, using it as a test to see how I could start making more fully-edited, scripted videos using my PNGTuber.

The first of these was an almost hour long video exploring my DVD/Blu-Ray collection.

April:

This was the month that I really pushed to get a load different videos out on my channel, with full illustrated thumbnails for each! This mostly consisted of a six-part let's play of the Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, cut down from an April fools day livestream.

I also did an impressions video about the Super Mario Bros movie and a scripted video about Easter eggs I snuck into my animations, just in time for Easter! I also made a speedpaint video for one of the video thumbnails and made a new logo for the speedpaint videos.

There was also a birthday card illustration for CherryT inspired by the Mario movie!

May:

May was a pretty quiet month, mainly consisting of two illustrations: a quick one of an OC for mermay and a piece of fan art of vTuber Asha the Game Genie. Both of these were captured off-stream and turned into speedpaint videos.

I also made a supercut of a Netherlands travel vlog from 2018 with a bunch of additional footage that I never got around to editing before, in time for the 5th anniversary of our friends wedding that we attended that year!

June:

My first big freelance project finally arrived between May and June, an informational film about Credit Unions, done in a similar style to several films I did last year, but with more colour in the mix.

I also did a couple of livestreams this month, namely a reaction stream to a Nintendo Direct and a Sonic anniversary stream, a part of which was edited into a video of me drawing obscure Sonic characters from memory.

July:

With that freelance project done and dusted I dedicated most of this month to some personal animating stuff: mainly giving my PNGTuber a fresh coat of paint by improving all the animations with more frames. I made a scripted video about the process.

I also made big progress on a re-animated collab shot that I finally finished in November.

August:

Browsing my pages you'd think I did absolutely nothing this month, but I was in fact deep in researching for a video series I plan to make for YouTube in the near future when I have more spare time for it. What started as a single short video idea deep-dived into a rabbit hole of fascinating stuff that I can't wait to share with you all!

I also started animating an intro for this video series, which is currently sitting in sketch form and will be returned to next year when I can!

September:

My YouTube planning had to be stuck on hold as another big freelance project landed on my lap: an informational film about community lenders. There is some pretty fun scenes in this, and yet another loan shark character! This took up all of September and was released at the end of October.

October:

Just as I wrapped up the previous project another even bigger one was being cooked up: a sequel to What a Waste! Once the filming of the puppetry and the recording of the voice talent was ready I could get to work on once again animating faces for the returning apple character and the five new characters!

What a Waste was a pretty experimental film but this time around I had a working system in place to jump straight in and assumed I would be able to get this one done in less time. I technically did get it done in less time because the deadline for it was much tighter, but it was a crunch to do so, consisting in total of over 2000 assets!

In the short space between these projects I illustrated Rouge the Bat based on a Twitter trend.

November:

November was mostly taken up by wrapping up production on Apple-y Ever After. In total it took about five weeks, about a week longer than I planned, not helped by me choking on a slice of potato that rendered shallowing anything difficult for weeks! It was a good thing CherryT was around at the time to perform a Heimlich maneuver on me! Absolute life saver!

A teaser trailer was released mid way through the month.

Once that was done with I went back and finally finished this shot for the Wario Ware GOLD re-Animated collab that I had been chipping away at on-and-off for around three years! It's done pretty nicely on both Newgrounds and YouTube. The full collab should be out sometime next year! Speaking of which, I have another shot reserved that I need to crack on with when I'm less busy with freelance work!

December:

I've started another big animation project that will run until the end of January and hopefully be released in Feb. This was the third project in a row with hardly a break in between and that, on top of the film work, left me feeling pretty burnt out, hence this quick doodle.

Digital Eclipse summed up the birthday cake CherryT made for me best!

I spent the spare time I had at the start of the month to make a video about the latest birthday cake CherryT made me. I also took this opportunity to edit remasters of previous cake videos, including one that was never finished. Here's the playlist for all six of them.

Apple-y Ever After finally released near Xmas, which meant I could publish this poster I made for it. Next month there will be a making of video published by Deadline and so far the film has been quite the hit, currently sitting at around 40K views!

Finally, I published an old Xmas animation from 2010 on YouTube, but because the original video had copyrighted music baked into the sound effects, I remade the soundtrack from scratch!

Previous years: 2022 - 2021 - 2020 - 2019

2018 - 2017 - 2016

[moonloredraws]

May Update

Ok so. The last few months my wrist has been giving me discomfort, almost daily. So... even though I’ve hyped up Mermay and the next Aberrant Tendencies project, I’m not going to be very active on the art front in May. Mermay updates will happen maybe once every 5 days, though Patreon Pages and commissions take precedence.

May won’t have a ton of drawings which sucks, but alas, I need to think in the long term and actually let my hand rest and keep wrist activities to a minimum. That being said, people who were planning on becoming Patrons, you’ll still get content! To make up for the lack of drawings, I’ll be working on scripts and fics, and other editing and pdf making work that doesn’t require me to strain my hand a lot. 

This is absolutely going to tank my mental health because I love drawing, it calms me down, AND my brain has tied my productivity to my self worth, but... well, hopefully my wrist will actually be better and I can start working in June and July without feeling like I’ve got something screwed a bit too tight in my wrist (and keep my workload at the lowest possible amount so I can keep drawing in the long term)

[frogsandfries]

I love migraine days

I got basically none of the diamond painting done that I intended to do today. However!

I did, this evening, finally bridge the gap between the old thumbnails and the new lineworks and I am so grateful to have this script because honestly, that is really me doing the job of lineworking for myself. Now I'm just going through the new lineworks and making sure that they also line up with the script, like I did with the lineworks from the old thumbnails. I'm getting pretty close to the end of the issue, so it's also getting to be time to find my transition to issue three.

Hopefully I'm feeling better tomorrow so I can take a really thorough crack at finishing the diamond painting.

Anyway, while I'm here, I saw an article this evening which reminded me of something I've been wanting to reflect on, but by the time I've had time and it's been on my mind these last few days, I've been too tired to actually think on the topic:

I've felt out of things to watch on YouTube, out of cool, interesting or inspiring podcasts to listen to while I work on my graphic novel. As a result, I've been watching like sketchbook tours and stuff like that. It gets me wishing that I had a YouTube-worthy, vlog-worthy sketchbook, filled with cool, colorful watercolor explorations or experiments in gouache.

I suppose I could definitely make/purchase a sketchbook just for doing like, 100 animal challenges and 100 face challenges and I could buy watercolors and colored pencils (or heck, watercolor pencils) and gouache and stuff and do line of motion studies improve my style and anatomy.

But I don't need Mermay or Inktober to inspire me or tell me what to draw. I already feel quite overwhelmed, creatively speaking, by trying to write and illustrate this absolutely gargantuan graphic novel.

Maybe one day (I doubt it), I'll need something like Mermay to inspire me and get my hand and mind moving. Maybe one day, I'll want to improve my anatomy and my style and filling a sketchbook with page after page of line of action and five-minute studies will be requisite.

Additionally, on the one hand, I don't think anyone really wants to see my linework sketchbooks or maybe it would be more of a Patreon reward kind of thing, since I'm miles ahead in linework of where I am in computing, never even mind posting. At the same time, it would definitely be fun to splash some watercolor down to break up the monotony of plain white pages. It would be fun to use colored gel pens to make my linework, instead of constantly using plain, boring black ink. I could probably even print patterned paper, but I guess I can't lose too much sleep over something that's meant to be utilitarian. The sketchbook is just a sketchbook, it's not an art journal.

And that really boils down my whole philosophy on sketchbooks. For me, sketchbooks make it easier to keep track of things like sticker/pin/patch or even poster ideas, but I'm just not really the type for little stickers or gluing in ephemera or using color in my sketches. I'm not even really comfortable with color media.

I would like to give it a try. I would kinda like to print all this stuff for my next project, but I literally probably have hundreds of pages of like, base pages and stuff to cut and layer. I was thinking about making this, I guess artist journal, the project itself, so I'm honestly not quite sure how that would go--almost might as just well make this sketchbook digitally anyway, right?