As A Piece Of Advice To Anyone Who Ever Gets Involved With Clients From Hell That Attempt To Stiff You

If there's anything I'm proud of today, it's that my Halloween pumpkin that I doodled at my day job today managed to earn me a Pez dispenser that's shaped like Eleven from Stranger Things.

I am weirdly proud of myself for this

Gonna do another Twitch Stream soon! Feel free to stop on by in the near future!

I’ve been going about some really rough color testing while I’ve been doing anatomical tweaks and ink refining on the main character of a webcomic I’m working on in my spare time.

It’s really frustrating, because I’m kind of old school with my mentality of “do not mix brown and black together, unless you are an unfashionable pleb”, but it seems like this calls for it. I’m sitting here thinking to myself “Hmn...can leather be dark red? How would I go about breaking that fashion rule? I don’t know how to approach this.” I’ve also noticed that character design for fantasy characters doesn’t typically have that many restraints, so part of me is wondering if I should just resign to mixing black and brown, and being like “Screw it, those are reddish-brown leather boots and gauntlets.”

I wish I didn’t have to wear glasses because I think I look significantly better without them, but I’m still quite fond of how I wear a suit.

I forgot to upload this here, although I did it a while ago with a friend who I did a lot of design challenges with to keep both of our skills as sharp as possible. We tend to alternate who comes up with the theme, and it was his turn when we got to this one.

We basically tried to design something based around the Bruce Lee quote “Be Water, My Friend”— which is a really eloquent quote. We also had a time limit of about 45 minutes.

Anyway, I’ve made these into stickers a few times. They were actually really popular at the last exhibition I had my work in. Also, this is transparent for all of your transparent needs.

Lastly, I should also note that the overlaid image -is- public domain, but it’s the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, if you don’t know it.

I just realized that I could have easily made an MS Excel spreadsheet for the economic model I usually construct for quoting design, instead of doing everything by hand with a pen and paper.

It would even automatically calculate annual metro-area inflation discrepancies FOR ME if I structured it like that, so that I can just feed it yearly data without worrying about it.

Doing it all on paper is just punching myself in the face.

I’m more or less satisfied with this, but this ultimately demonstrated a huge problem in graphic design. Specifically, when you find a really good font, but you have to either pay money or contact someone to use it for commercial use.

I say this because the left one is completely freeware fonts (Milkshake + Ostrich Sans), but the right one uses Blacksword, which is only free for personal use. I COULD do my own handlettering, but that’s time consuming on my end, and I want to turn this into a card ASAP...so in terms of my time, that’s not an option.

I’m kinda sad that I can’t commercially use the right one at this time. At least I have a cute corgi in a bowtie staring at me to reassure me that it’s all gonna be ok.

(And for the record, I am aware that you cannot actually give alcohol to doggos. Truffles had no wine, and the wine is only there as a photoshoot prop. My roommate drank the wine later. Truffles got to have a couple of crackers, though.)

So, I started my Twitch stream on a newer page and the like—although I still need to do a few tweaks to a previous comic page.

Unrelated; I was really sad to find out that Odile van der Stap/jumei passed away recently; I really loved her work when I was on DeviantArt years and years ago, and it was really shocking learn this when I wanted to mention an artist I really liked in context of a specific thing in the Twitch stream.

That said, I’ve found that I don’t handle learning that people have passed away, period.

This has been an idea I’ve been meaning to implement for a while...and by a while, I mean a few years now. For a while, I didn’t have the emotional fortitude to think about it, let alone sitting down and actually making it.

I still don’t think that this does a whole lot of justice regarding the sheer devastation I feel towards gun violence at this point in my life, but at least I finally gathered the guts to make this today. In a sense, I’d like to think that I’m not as plagued with the idea as I was now that I’ve let this come into existence.

Oh, by the way — I did listen to Childish Gambino’s This Is America while working on this.

So, I had this commission for a friend that I finally finished—I have to say that I’m proud of myself for getting Photoshop CC’s current liquefy tool to recognize this as an actual face and let me make a few slight tweaks as if it was a photo of an actual person. I legit did not expect that.