rickleone
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End of Summer Update
🕑 Added 2023-08-23 20:28:03 +0000 UTCHey guys, sorry for the unannounced hiatus, but I got caught up in a series of home improvements and usual Summer laziness.
Sure trying over and over for new profile headers ate up a discrete amount of time, and I'm finishing the third, which seems pretty satisfying and representative of what I make.
And I've decided to start a new series (the teaser of that you see above) or better, a new habit of one-hour doodles per day, which is a stretch considering that each one of the characters took me an hour (in their full figure), but it's for sure a more time-economical way to vent out some ideas that flutter in my mind.
This one, in particular, is pretty suggestive since it will involve muscle growth and will be released daily during October, as a way to do the art challenge month without losing my mind and my hand.
Speaking of which, another thing I'm planning to do is an illustrated calendar of 2024 which is going to list every art challenge and event I can find. Inktober, Minotaur March, Mermay, Smaugust, and also singular recurrences like Pokemon Day, or May the Fourth. I will list every World [Animal] Day, just like Catholic Calendars list the saints. I wonder if I should list also moon phases while I'm at it. For gardeners, wiccans and werewolves, you know.
For now, I'm planning to format it like a one-page desktop background, but if I find good feedback while posting some teasers in the last months of 2023, I might consider selling printed versions with multiple sheets you can flip. The single-page version will require also a bunch of graphic design study since I will have to condense both text and artwork in a very tiny space and I might directly ask you for feedback.
"Uh wow this guy can't keep up with his comics and he has picked two more projects that will drive him crazy." I guess you're thinking.
And I agree with you.
But this time I have another move to make: using 3D. It's not the first time that I say it, but the previous one I was doing it all on my own with the bare-bones theory behind me. This week instead I've caught up with some of the hundreds of hours (and euros) of Blender tutorials I've bought in the past years. I started off with a pretty notorious course from Victory 3D about sculpting an orc that would fit in a WoW cinematic, and I was doing pretty well with the modeling.
Then I stopped because I needed to make quick poses and light references for my 2D art, not realistic models that would melt my computer for the number of textures they carry on.
I will finish the course but with calm, after I'm done with the three that delve into the basics of Blender and animating and shading in a pleasant way low-poly models, which is exactly what I'm searching for.
Right now I'm following the rigging course, and it's blowing my mind, but I totally see myself in the near future modeling low-poly versions of a series of stereotypical characters (gorilla, orc, big guy, werewolf, ogre, hyper, normie etc.) slapping on them a toon shader, staging a scene in ten minutes instead of doing endless trial and error with poses and references, and then use my 2D skills to draw over a bunch of polygons real characters with curves and expressions.
With the right shaders and tweaks, it would be a great way to have crowd shots already done without relying on premade silhouettes that don't match up with my style or painstakingly sketching out dozens of different characters every time.
Like the body-kun puppet but useful.
It's already what a lot of artists are doing, and Clip Studio Paint has a built-in feature for 3D models, which is as useful as a bicycle for a fish in my case since they're just the skinny boy and skinny girl body types and I'm not getting into Isekai any time soon.
What I'm getting into is 3D animation! Which is going to function just a support for 2D animation. I'm not fooling myself: it will take a year at least since I want to retrict the time doing that to one hour per day. But doing the storyboard I'm already listing all the isolated loops and assets (like character designs and background elements) I can realize and post separately, so it won't come out of nothing on October 2024 but you will be quite teased.
What will be about? Well, three elements for now: barbarians, demons and magic mirrors.
It's quite the challenge but I feel motivated, and one of the reasons is that I've decided to remove a certain someone from my life.
Warning: long-winded recollection of events that demonstrate my lack of self-respect ahead. Reader discretion is advised.
You might have already noticed him in the past since he was the one commenting on every single post of mine in a very awkward and ungrammatical way.
He was a client and patron, with a thing for jumpchain, which is a hybrid roleplay-fanfiction challenge on Reddit about guys jumping from one narrative universe to another. I never got into that because it feels convoluted as fuck, but I always respected the endeavor. And I always found very endearing his apparent coping with reality through writing and imagination, since I relate to that, and also his efforts to make it a long-distance friendship, even if responding to his questions about my life always made me uncomfortable.
But I soon realized that he was sucking my energies and time away. Every commission/reward he asked for was a character design starting from commission docs that were at least 10 pages long, written in broken English that always made me assume he was an immigrant in the US, but no, he is 100% native English speaker but he can't write a sentence starting with the fucking subject.
He asked me to do editing work for his docs and stories, and I can't stress it enough, I'm not a native English speaker. I'm Italian: I learned English on YouTube, I don't feel qualified in the least to do editing, but still, I get why he asked me for help.
Because I write in much better English than him and I'm cheap as fuck. Why am I cheap? Because I'm an idiot moved by pity because I understood he is a poor person living with a never treated neurodivergence because the US healthcare system sucks ass. So I charged him peanuts like I'm still a budding 15 years old artist from a Country with shit currency.
I carried on for at least a year, getting literal headaches every time I had to work on his commissions and parse out the meaning from his convoluted docs, fully aware that I was taking time from doing things that I and my audience would have liked.
I've ignored obvious red flags, like his opinions on "AI" "Art" (you know which type of opinions) his total blindness to art processes, like emulation and different rendering, and his obsession over teenage characters. Or the fact he never commented on the fact that I stopped posting his stuff on my profile like his subjects were poison for my gallery or something.
Until one day, a few months ago, weeks after I had already done a piece for him (two times because he didn't like the position of the arm in the previous one) for free because it was a Patreon reward, he asked for a new one because I had been late and it was already time. In the meanwhile I did for him a commission template to help him skim down the details of his chimeric characters and conceal his poor English for other artists. I assumed that it replaced my reward.
I realized then that he didn't want to support me, or ever understood how to do that. He wanted an idiot to magic into existence his fantasies about Ronaldo Fryman and the Sultan from Disney's Aladdin for free.
I said to him "No, I don't want anymore." And he responded with 40+ messages over the night, and after I read one of them saying "And I even sticked to your commission template" like he was doing a favor to me and not the other way around, I popped and I went into a blocking spree, I went to my Paypal account and sent him the equivalent of six months of Patreon support. he could have taken it, or given it back, but he did the worst thing: he gave me back a part of that since the last reward covered a part of that period.
He just admitted that this was purely transactional. I was his bitch and he believed he deserved it because he was poor and smart and misunderstood and won my friendship by asking a lot of unsolicited questions and made jokes about my personal life.
I'm sorry, he's certainly a hurting person living with a lot of troubles, but I've not the power nor the moral obligation to help him. I have to take care of myself first, of my art and of the adorable husky mutt that the frozen depths of hell dropped on my lap three months ago.
It was a long tangent, and I'm sorry if it bored or made uncomfortable some of you, but now, without the worry of that energy vampire, I feel more motivated than ever.
Art coming soon.
Comments
dindondandoo00
Hey. Amazing work on the 3D orc sculpt! Your strong understanding of anatomy and 2D illustration style is translating well. Looking forward to seeing the finished 3D work and your return to your art.
