2015 Recap

Today is the last day of 2015! Overall 2015 has been a pretty good year, and certainly a very busy year for me! First I'm going to recap my art progression for this year.

Here you can see what each month looked like.

And as you may have noticed, this year I was able to keep up (for the most part) with my daily characters! The summer was a little tough to keep up on because of work, but that doesn't mean I didn't draw SOMETHING every day.

But the year started off as my final semester at CCAD, which was definitely my best semester. Not only did I graduate in May, but I also released the demo for my game Detective Ragger (you can download that here).

A month after I graduated, I had the amazing opportunity to work at iD Tech Camp in Seattle, Washington. I loved Seattle and it's probably my favorite place that I've been so far. I met tons of new people and made lots of new friends. It was my best camp experience so far, that's for sure.

After camp was over, I bought myself a cintiq with the money I earned over the summer. It has helped me grow a lot artistically, and helps keep me motivated to work on projects. Definitely the best investment I have ever made. I noticed how much my art has improved from having a cintiq, so I'm really glad that I went through and finally made the purchase.

And in addition to my daily characters that I've been doing all year, I've also been keeping up and doing a lot more daily projects since I got back from camp. September was mostly a month to get back in the groove of working on things, but after that, I stared up daily projects. I participated in Inktober (for October), Huevember (for November), and Digicember (for December). So I've been keeping myself busy on my own projects. I usually only spend about 30 minutes to an hour (at most) on these daily projects so I don't get burnt out.

But in addition to those projects, ever since I came home in late August, I have been doing daily fundamental drawings. I haven't been posting those here because they're just for myself as a means of practice. I'm trying to better my abilities, and practicing the fundamentals is definitely what I found I needed to do. I have been doing an hour of fundamental drawing every single day since August. I've been doing them on scrap paper so I don't have to spend money on sketchbooks, so here's my pile of what I've got done so far:

 

And in addition to all of the practice that I've been doing, I've also been working as a freelance artist. I haven't been able to post any of the projects yet because of contracts, but when I do have the opportunity to, I will for sure. I just finished up a 2 minute animation project for a client earlier in December, so since then I've been working on smaller-scale projects to kind of slow down for the holidays.

But as I mentioned above, 2015's been super busy but I grew a lot! Both artistically and as a person. After graduation, it's been hard to keep in contact with everyone, but I've been at least catching up with some of my closest friends fairly often. It's tough not living with them, but I'm sure I'll be able to someday in the future. Now's just the time to save up money until I am able to afford living in another area.

I'm happy with how 2015 turned out overall though. I remember being super worried about what would happen after graduation, but I've been hanging in there and trying to take some time to relax and enjoy life. I don't want to overwork myself, but it's good to keep working on stuff every day in addition to taking some time for myself. Things have been going well, so I'm excited about what else is to come!

Quicker Digicember Doodles

Since it's been Christmas time, I haven't really been spending as much time on these doodles. But I've been drawing more fun characters at least!

"MaMa's Discovery"

MaMa is showing Kai a new type of flower in the forest.

"Cimc the Cheater"

Cimc telling Ralphie to go to the losers area, even though Cimc lost the match.

Familiar Characters

These are some characters that are often seen interacting, so they were a lot more natural to draw.

"Kali and Piko's Dance"

Kali taking Piko to dance with her. This could have been sometime during the SN World Festival.

"Opening Christmas Presents"

Vhan got coal for Christmas, but Johnny isn't surprised.

Biggert City Characters!

For my recent daily characters, I've been coming across a lot of Biggert City characters. I feel like they're always fun to re-imagine.

Mr Boo Bear is a very friendly young creature who likes to pretend that he's a bear sometimes. He loves to role-play and create characters/personas of his own. Mr Boo Bear is very nice, but it doesn't take much to make him cry.

Mayor Pang is the diligent mayor of Biggert City who is very kind and loved by the people. This penguin has close ties with TGWTLT, and basically is the figure head while TGWTLT runs the city behind the scenes. Mayor Pang is a very good spokesman and a great public speaker. He always wants to help and do what is best for the creatures of Biggert City.

Large Comic Page

For Christmas this year, I made a large-scaled traditional comic page for my brother. I've got tons of extra good quality paper from when I was a student, so I decided to make use of some of that. And since it was too big to scan, so I got some progress photos instead. It's based upon a journal entry I wrote a little while back (you can read the whole thing here).

The final comic page!

First I sketched out a storyboard and page layout on a smaller 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper.

Then I sketched the layout to match on a larger scale piece of paper.

Next, I tied down the roughs.

Then I inked it in.

     

And finally, the color! So here are the close-up shots to show the details.

And this was a little test/doodle sheet of paper I had for testing colors. I even thought about coloring it in marker at one point, but colored pencil seemed like the wiser decision.

Short Animation Project

This year for Christmas, I made a short animation. The full video is much longer, but was mostly dialogue-driven parts with tons of inside jokes between the two of us, so I just decided to upload this shortened version. This whole minute-long video was thought up in one night, and all made in the span of about 5 hours at most, I'd say. It was fun to kind of just make up something on the spot and play around with some effects.

These are some quick illustrations I did for the credits sequence.

Intermissions from Another Timeline from Michelle Rakar on Vimeo.

And here's the actual video!

Digicember Doodles for Christmas!

It's Christmas! So here are some Digicember doodles that I've done the past two days.

"Only Demon Food"
Snull refuses to eat anything other than Demon food, so Thing happily eats her cheeseburger.

"Christmas Gift"
Shaw came home for Christmas to visit his mother.

Merry Christmas!

With it being Christmas Eve, I made a little gift for my three best friends who have stuck with me since the first week of college. It's been over 5 years and they still like me, so I am very grateful to have them in my life. 

From left to right Zandra (my character), Diane (Hillary's character), Emily (Jinny's character), and Pepper (Laura's character).

And since it's always fun to show progress, here are a few shots:

Digicember Scenes

These scenes were ones that actually happened in The Nays, so they were fun to re-imagine and draw in a short period of time.

"Pearl, You're Coming Too!?"

Pubby is overjoyed when Pearl mentions that he might come home with him to escape the Exile World (Snowy scene to celebrate the first day of winter, which was when I drew this).

"I Never Wanna See Your Face Again"

Rocko and Haru's last time seeing each other... and it ended on a bad note. Rocko's last words to Haru were "Shut up, I never want to see your face again!"

Costard & Akki

These two just so happened to be involved in the whole Demon World arc of The Nays. Costard is from the Demon World, though he isn't directly involved in the Akki/Akuma story.

Costard is a very polite demon who loves his job. He is very friendly and welcoming, and will always help guests to the Hillside Manor feel like they are at home. He usually puts others a lot higher than himself though, which makes him have self-confidence issues. Costard is generally someone that is fun to be around and is always very pleasant.

Akki is a very timid young boy who lives at an orphanage in PS World. He is the alternate dimension self of Akuma, so is captured when Akuma joins the Death Association. Akki is a boy of few words and is never really seen happy. He's shy and doesn't really have any friends, other than Pachiru.

More Time on Digicember

I've been spending more time on my Digicember sketches and actually finding reference for them. They definitely turn out better when I do!

"Dark Vaiyo Awakened"

Trekkon (now working for Death) first attempting to kidnap Sarah (now as a Dark Vaiyo).

"New Lady's New Pet"

New Lady petting Luxa.

Babies

Since I happened to make a bunch of the babies' birthdays be in January, that was this week's drawings.

King Baby is a royal baby who is the leader of the "Mini-game Babies." He ridicules anything that is not "royal" in his eyes. King Baby is very demanding and forces his friends to follow his every order, telling them that it will make them more "royal."

Mr Purple PJs is the "royal baby" of the Mini-game Island Babies. He is very proper for a baby, and serves the babies as a butler. He is often taken advantage of because of his kind personality, and will do as the other babies ask him without question.

Nays Collab The Board Game

So this is a fun little project that my brother and I started at the very beginning of winter break. We only played it for two days total, but it was a lot of fun. We created a board game for our characters to play and are having them gain "points" for the game by the number of notes they get on Tumblr. You can check out the blog here. A lot of these drawings you see will be collaborations we did. The ones I did not take part in are not pictured here, but are pictured on the blog.

Pixel art of Wes and Lupita.

This was a short comic we made. The only panel I drew was the long horizontal one in the middle.

Photo album page where there was a prompt to draw the other Nay that was playing at the time as an animal. And then one of The Nays had to make a comment on the page.

Collaboration drawing of random stuff. I drew Gojo (the one laying on the ground) and Lonny (the one taking a photo with his phone).

Two "Guess the Character" drawings where we searched for the newest drawing on the Fanart page of deviantART and drew one of the characters we recognized from the page.

And then these are some paper cut-out Nays that we made. My two are on the right side and his are the two on the left. There are also closeups we took of them, I just included the two I did on here, but they're all on the blog.

Pink Characters

I guess this week was pink/purple character week.

Chila is a very unintelligent girl who loves her older brother Ronny. She is entertained very easily and loves living in the dump. She is amused by playing with garbage and eating crackers. Although her intelligence level is quite low, she is still a very polite girl.

Andrea is a woman that was turned into a chair by The Mother Who Talks Like This. Though she was transformed into a chair, she still has the power to fly around. She is very close friends with Nifitann, and will almost always be at her side. She allows for Nifitann to ride on her, and the two work very well together as a team. Andrea is very polite, but does not talk very much.

Sketchings

I've been doodling in my sketchbook more. Whenever I wanna quickly design a character, I feel like my sketchbook's been a lot faster and more efficient than spending time on a finished digital piece.

These are some sketches I did of some new side characters.

And this is a little sketch I did of part of the most recent Eventure I wrote. Darkitu is trying to explode Ginko's Sanctuary.