May Recap

After valiantly trying to keep posting through my sickness in March and April, I finally lost the energy to keep up. All my energy was going into getting through the days and staying present at work. Hobbies are always the first thing to suffer when the going gets tough.

And as a person who works best with momentum and consistency, losing my stride is one of the worst things that can happen to my practice.

I’m now in the stages of trying to get re-interested in drawing. Doing focused practice isn’t “fun” but I did it regularly because I do find myself improving because of it. But that doesn’t make it desirable. So instead of trying to get back into WAPs and anatomy studies and doing the classic “draw what you want” approach.

Currently that means having a bunch of half-finished pieces hanging around with no idea if I’m ever going to finish them or not. But they have gotten me drawing again.

New Skril piece

I did this base sketch back during my Hades art week. It’s from an Adorka Stock reference piece and I was really proud of how I managed the hands.

In the last few weeks I’ve done a cleanup pass and added clothes. Last week I started watching a lot of improve your lineart technique videos in preparation for inks. But first I want to clean up the face because it’s at an angle I’ve never worked at before and the hair could use more confident shapes. After that I hope to give working with vector lines a try.

TrueRef Draw This! Monthly challenge

I follow a few stock pose creators on socials as it’s always nice to have quick access to images to work from for poses, anatomy, and gesture studies. TrueRef is a newer one to me and I only learned of their Draw This! Challenge this month. The month's image was inspiring to me so I wanted to work from it and then ended up liking how it was turning out.

I ended up doing multiple cleanup passes on it before submitting it to a Drawfee critique class to get some feedback. I now want to do a few alterations and fixes to it before moving it on to lines. What I really want to do is try to push the expressions on the faces, it’s an area I struggle with so I’m happy to have an opportunity to focus on it.

Fatespinner

After finally finishing Blue Prince we’ve been preparing to return to studio and game work. This led to starting a self guided online course on game design and then to do a paper prototype of a card game.

As a studio we’ve been thinking of ways to make our original game Love in the Time of Spellphage more interactive. It’s currently a Visual Novel with choices that change the game but it doesn’t have much for gameplay elements beyond that. So we wanted to introduce something that doesn’t feel like a tacked on mini game. It needs to fit in the world and contribute to the existing elements of choices and magic. This led to what we’re currently calling Fatespinner. A puzzle card game about finding your way.

We’ve been actively working on it for about 2 weeks now. We’re still refinding and developing the mechanics but we’re very happy with the central make-up of the game so far. Now it’s about tuning for difficulty and finding ways for players to customize their own approaches.

I’ve started to do some concept work for the cards. We aren’t set on a specific style yet so I’m very much in the zone of trying out a lot of different things. With our main requirement being that we don’t want it to take forever…

While Spellphage was the original building block for the game we’re now deep into thinking about the themes and what’s fun about this card game. About how many layers of complexity we want and what kind of story it would best serve. So there is a chance that this card game grows beyond what we envisioned for Spellphage to the point of becoming its whole own game.

Conclusion

June is shaping up to be a very busy month so I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to fully return to any kind of scheduled, consistent art practice. I suspect it will be more chipping away at existing pieces while workshopping lots of different card styles.

We’re going to attend the Narrascope conference online later in the month. And I’ve signed up for Spencer Wan’s draftmanship for animation lesson. Which I can’t find a page for so might actually be sold out already!

July is going to bring it possibly multiple medical things so I also don’t want to bank on feeling super great and inspired then. So maybe August, in the peak of summer heat, things might start to stabilise again...