CUPdate 37: Recap and Plans for the Year

I've been making a lot of blog posts recently, so I wanted this to be a shorter post to summarize those posts for my CUPdate presentation. I'm also going to talk about the projects and everything I've been working on since the last CUPdate!

To start off, here's the summary of my project-based goals for 2022 and how those went:

• Draw Every Day: For the first few months, I did actually draw every day. Once my health issues started to spiral downward in June, I stopped being as consistent, but I did still post a digital sketchbook page every month besides December.
• Compass Nays: I didn't finish the prologue. This one should probably be put on hold. I DID finish a full game called Spirits of Combination Village though, so I'd say that can count in its place!
• Eventure Twine: I finished at least 1 Eventure Twine. I also started on a second one and got a headstart on a lot of storyboards for various Eventures that I read or rewrote. I also organized all of them into Google Docs and read through a lot/did a lot of proofreading, so I made really good progress on this.
• Monthly Nay Days: I set these up with my brother and we met pretty much every month for the most part! They were really helpful and we're going to try and do more.
• Talk more about The Nays: I created the Nay A Week vlog! I also talked more about what happens in the actual Eventures in my CUPdate presentations in December.

And then here are my goals for 2023:

• Draw daily, or as often as possible, and post those digital sketchbook pages online once a month.
• Meet with my brother bi-weekly for Nay Days.
• Create 2 Eventure Twines for The Nays. Also continue to focus on The Nays with proofreading, storyboards, and rewrites.
• Record a new vlog series called Eventure A Week. Talk about each Eventure in less than 30 seconds each, spoiler-free.

Since the last CUPdate, I finished the Cimc Eventure Twine! Check out the post here to learn more about that and read through the Eventure. I made a landing page website here and posted the Twine on itchio here.

For Christmas, I got Colors Live on Nintendo Switch, so I'm excited to have a way to create digital art portably now! I've been doing some of the daily challenges that they have and they have some fun limitations to help me get used to using the platform. You can view my profile here.

 

I also met with my brother over the break and we finished writing The Nays Eventure, which is the 3rd Eventure and the next one for me to create a Twine out of. So now I can progress forward on that. We also talked about some plans for the next ones that are earlier in the story, so we might start working on those ones during our next Nay Days. I also read the Stinky Girl Eventure, which is one that I wrote back in April, so he got to hear that part of the story finally.

I also finished my Nay A Week vlog series. I recorded a video (roughly) each week throughout 2022 and talked about The Nays generally. It ranges from general story explanations to what projects I was working on, or just random thoughts or tidbits that I had about what was going on in The Nays.

And then as a tradition, my first drawing of 2023 is related to Cipo. I drew a scene from the Project CBF Eventure that I wrote last year. This is when The Nays let Milada free in the lab and she sees Ciporsius after learning about his time travel plans relating to her.

I also made a Notion page where I'm going to plan out and track what projects my brother and I do during our bi-weekly voice chats! And I have a database of options for us to do so we know what's upcoming as well.

So that's it for this post! I got a lot of end of the year stuff done and also started to draw more. This is probably because I had some time off from work so had more time to dedicate to projects, but I hope I can keep some of this up in the weeks to come, too!

CUPdate 30: Combination Village Videos & Back to The Nays

I have been giving myself a break since the last CUPdate since I worked so hard to finish my game leading up to that one.

I started out by wrapping up a few things on my Spirits of Combination Village game. While the game itself was finished before the deadline, there were a few marketing/sharing things that I wanted to focus on since I usually don't spend a lot of time on that after a game is done. I started by making a video playthrough of the game.

I've also been seeing a few people streaming the games submitted to IGMC and I've loved seeing people's reactions to my game! It's been so much fun and very inspiring to see people enjoying a game I worked so hard to make. Then I started posting it on more sites include RPGmaker.net, the RPG Maker Web forums, and GameJolt. With that, I decided to make a trailer so I could better showcase what the game further than just screenshots.

Then I decided to transition back into working on The Nays, since it's been awhile! I started by just reading some Eventures from where I left off a couple of months ago to get back into it. And then I did a few sketches of them to get back into drawing more too.

Then I remembered my project that I abandoned last month for my game: my daily digital sketchbook! I won't be able to keep up with it for all of August since I'll be traveling a bit, but I did want to get back into that again a little bit. So I did some sketches for two days so far and had a lot of fun! I listened to Live A Live music both nights and honestly just let myself be really loose and sketchy. Lately I realize my drawings have been really stiff, so honestly taking a one month break from much drawing (other than game assets) really helped. Now I've come back fresh and I'm not afraid to make mistakes and have been able to really just be sketchy and feel things out. This made me really excited to get back into drawing and I actually had a lot of fun, which I've been noticing hasn't been happening with drawing lately, so I'm thrilled that the passion is finally back because I've really missed it.

So while this started as a sketch, I ended up getting carried away and turning it into a full illustration because I was having so much fun with it. I'm actually drawing posed characters from my imagination and not hating how it's coming out, which is a first!

I turned this drawing into the scene when Akuma faces off against Yuka and Mabui in the Death's Finale Eventure. I was listening to Gigalovania from Live A Live while drawing this too.

Recently I had a pretty bad downward spiral with a lot of doubts about myself and creating personal projects, but after making a game in a month and seeing the massive positive reaction I've gotten on it, even from people who I don't know, that really helped bring me back and feel so much better. It was a really nice confidence booster for someone like me who honestly has a lot of trouble with that.

I haven't been this excited to create art in a very long time, so like I said, I'm very happy to be back. I know I didn't have a lot to show this time around, but I am very happy with how I'm feeling overall. This year has been really rough due to just things going on in my life, so the fact that I'm finally letting myself enjoy my personal projects again and be happy making art is huge.

I'm not expecting next post to really have much either, but I will pick projects up again in September. I'm going on a trip in a couple of weeks so the next CUPdate won't be for awhile, but I'm not planning to get much done on my projects during that time.

CUPdates 3: Experimenting with Brushes and Color

For this week's CUPdates, I decided to get back into drawing more since I've been doing a lot of writing and game design recently for these. I've been fairly busy with traveling and catching up with people the past few weeks, so there's not quite as much to report, but I did do some drawings!

I started off by downloading some of Jinny's brushes that she made, since I wanted to do a digital painting. She kindly provided me with a personalized 2-hour tutorial where I followed along and made a digital painting based on her demonstration, while she showed me how she uses some of her brushes. Here's what I made during that demo:

After that, I decided to get back into making card art for the TCG that I started working on a few years back. I started by using Jinny's brushes and just trying to make a lineless digital painting of Xing: 

It turned out okay, but lineless is something I struggle with a lot, so I was trying to figure out how to make digital paintings in my own style, and something that I like in the end. So with that, I was starting to reflect on the art I've created so far this year. I haven't been creating a whole lot because I've been focused on writing and game design so much, so I was inspired to create something new.

I realized I started sketching out a few story moments from the Glitch Vessels Eventure a few months back, but never finished it. So these are the ones I did back in February:

Looking at those made me realize how those were some of the best drawings I made so far this year. So I wanted to think about what made me like those drawings so much more. It was because while I was creating those, I really got involved in my story and blocked out the rest of the world while creating them. I wasn't worried about how it was gonna look (so much that I even forgot to post them after I made them), I just had fun drawing and expressing the story moments. I did a bunch more as well, but those two I actually ended up coloring and spending more time on.

So I started to read the rest of that Eventure, and then just started sketching story moments as I read and listened to music. And I ended up staying up until like 3am sketching because I was so lost in time and just having a lot of fun drawing. Here are two of the ones I made that night:

In those two drawings above, I had a lot of fun with Jinny's brushes for the colors and added effects. I also experimented more with the colors, where I was trying out different color variations for the light and shadows, and they turned out way better than I normally do. So I really need to jump out of my comfort zone some more and do that more often.

Something I realized from all of this was that I really draw best when I recently read the story moments that I wrote and am listening to the music that I listened to while writing those moments. Because when I remember how it felt in the moment of writing it, it really helps me to get back into the mode for drawing the scene with that same impact. I draw much more loosely and I realize my drawings have more personality when I do this.

So other than drawing, I've also been writing a lot of the Garlint Eventure with my brother. We ended up finishing writing the first half of it, and I really liked how it turned out so far! Not a lot to show on that front since it's a lot of writing, but I'm happy we finally went back and wrote that one, since I've been wanting to write it for a while now.

So overall, while there's not a ton to show for this CUPdate, I do think I'm moving back in the right direction for where I want to take my art, which is a huge improvement and makes me feel better for what's to come. Until next time!

Blogger: A New Purpose

Hey, it's been a while since I last made a blog post here. 

Card Art of Sarah for an OC TCG I've been on and off working on with friends.

This has been a weird year. I've been keeping up on posting art on a few other sites, but I realize I kind of abandoned Blogger, unintentionally. I don't plan to abandon it forever though. I'm merely planning to repurpose what I use this blog for. Any time I want to showcase progress on an illustration from start to finish, or just post a lot of drawings from a bigger project, I plan to post those all at once here. I also will still make my yearly end of the year recap and beginning of the year posts. I just don't plan to use Blogger as a way to show frequent art updates like I used to. 

If you're interested in those, check out my Discord server, Instagram, or deviantART. Those are the places I'm most active and will be posting most frequently. 

I'll talk more about why I'm making this change in more depth in a few months when I make my recap of the year post, but as I mentioned earlier, it's been a weird year, and rather than abandoning Blogger entirely, this is what I decided was best going forward. Though I'll probably only be making a few posts a year on here, I'm not leaving for good. 

Because it's been so long, here's some art I have created this year:

Val's NAD

Mooth in TWEWY style

I'll be sure to post more in my later posts, like the yearly recap, and anything else that comes before that as well. So anyway, thanks for sticking with me during this time. Until next time!

Old Forgotten Posts of 7 Years: Part 3

Here's part 3 of my old blog posts from 2019-2020. I'm posting these in 2025, but scheduling them to show up back when they were actually made.

Doodles from Work (February 10, 2020)

Here are some drawings I did for fun at work!

I kinda want to start spending more time on single drawings. This one took me a lot longer than my regular sketches and I used a much more painted technique, but it was a lot of fun and I'd like to do more of these!

This was a fun drawing I did of Warbler!

We drew penguins at work, because why not?

 

Evo is a character I've been using in some of my projects at work, so I kinda was thinking of redesigning or coming up with a more final design for future assets.

Concepting and Experimenting (February 5, 2020)

These were some fun little experiments I did recently.

I tried out a different coloring experiment during my lunch break today. Color is something I've always felt like I needed to work on, so more experimenting to come!

I made some concepts for what Pidgebeetle's training uniform for The Nays might look like. I wanted to make it more bird-like, and redid his symbol.

More Music Mania! (January 25, 2020)

I was kinda stressed one day so I did some Music Mania doodles and it helped!

Spy Snugs (January 15, 2020)

This was a Nay Event I did about a year or so ago. It had to do with browsing Twitch and drawing over screenshots/guessing what the other person chose. You can read the full rules here.

Here was the digital drawing of Persona Q.

And then these were the traditional portions.

January Music Mania Sketches (January 11, 2020)

Here are a few recent Music Mania sketches that I did during in January!

Wow this was a productive Music Mania! I came up with a bunch of new ideas to fix up the Land of the Clouds Eventure AND I finally came up with an idea on how to use this character that I designed almost a year ago.

I did this one during my lunch break.

Warbler Vs. Melinda Storyboards (January 7, 2020)

So right now at work, I'm writing a 2D Animation course, which means I get to create lots of art! These are some storyboard sketches I did for some of the content I'm working on.

First Drawing of 2020 (January 2, 2020)

It's the first drawing of 2020 and the first drawing of this decade! And to keep up my tradition that was started at the end of 2 decades back, it features Cipo.

This past year I played a bunch of games, including Trails of Cold Steel. Cipo picked up the line they use in battle of "It's my turn!" and often says that whenever Nays are playing games so that they'll stop playing or move on. Though he never actually takes his turn, he still has enjoyed saying it for fun.

Check out the links in this image description to see the previous years!

And here's the process gif!

Fanart Doodles (September 25, 2019)

I beat Trails of Cold Steel last night, so I decided to doodle Rean during my lunch break today! The ending was really good and I'm already waiting for the second one to come in the mail so I can continue the story.

FF8 Composition Studies (September 3, 2019)

With FFVIII Remastered coming out today, I decided to do some composition studies based on some of the camera angles in Dollet's maps during my lunch break.

November Improvement Movement

I got a little behind on my Improvement Movement drawings, but here's the belated November prompt - taking a figure drawing and turning it into a character drawing.

Here's the final result!

First I started with a bunch of figure drawing sketches.

Then I highlighted the ones I liked best.

And then here's the rest of the process of sketching start to finish!

And as a bonus, here was the first doodle I tried of Sarah. I didn't really like how this one was coming out, so I didn't finish it.