I Am Super Happy To Call This Finished. It’s Not Perfect, But It’s At The Point Where My Personal

This is my Day 1 for Inktober—and like a total nerd, I decided to draw a greyscale Alolan Muk for the theme of “Poisonous”.

I know Alolan Muk is super colorful, but I’m thinking that keeping the greyscale palette that I intend to keep for my (mostly neglected) webcomic would be good practice.

So, I decided to buy Hirohiko Araki's "Manga in Theory and Practice: The Craft of Creating Manga" book with an Amazon gift card I got for completing a survey...because my accidental splurges tend to to entail buying art books that I buy in the hopes that artists better than I am might rub off on me, and I really like Hirohiko Araki and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure a lot.

Anyway, lemme just say that I found myself saying "Bless your heart, Araki...", because of one particular paragraph in the book (on page 69, in Chapter 3).

I don't know if Araki realizes that "Stein" and "Berg" are stereotypically Jewish last name endings or not, or if this is the translator's own commentary, but just...

... I can't help but laugh with pity, because it's just...why? Perhaps he doesn't know that specific thing about Western culture or something, idk, but it's something that warrants a very stern "oy vey" and laughing because of just how naive it comes across as. If anything, I'd imagine people with -stein and -berg last names as being minor characters in Seinfeld.

Most of the advice seems pretty similar to what's offered in Scott McCloud's "Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels", with some clear cut differences on things like execution of the book itself, opinions on digital versus traditional art, differing takes on the important components of what makes good sequential art good, etc.

Otherwise, the books is relatively similar to any other book on sequential art, and it's still interesting to take a glimpse at his opinions, especially when I'm leaning towards the assumption this is more of a minor faux pas with Araki being kind of a Westaboo than anything. He still ultimately strikes me as a man who's really dedicated to his craft more than anything else.

I have 50 followers now! I’m planning on doing a Twitch stream around 6:30PM EST or so in order to personally celebrate. (And I will uncharacteristically draw fan art chibis. Probably.)

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.

Have a goofy, transparent Sonic the Hedgehog.

It was something I wanted to do for Dumb Running Sonic, but never got to. I still haven’t gotten to animating the poor guy, either.

Also, it was inspired a bit by Ren and Stimpy. There may be an accompanying Tails in the near future. (So far, he kinda looks creepy more than gooby, so I don’t know how I feel about my Tails prototype.)

Current lessons in DuoLingo land; being specific about translating 写真 as “photo” as opposed to “picture” because it’s already a pet peeve of yours to call photographs “pictures” in ENGLISH, and that’s technically what’s going on here already…is apparently a penalty in Japanese.

Also, taking a more literal translation with 良い is also a penalty.

(I’m concerned about this happening with Mandarin soon, too, even if I’ve yet to encounter that at this time.)

This is the culmination of a six week class on 3D modeling that’s required for me to officially grab one of my two degrees.

I’m also pretty happy that I thought of a game idea where you’d need light to survive—to the point where you’d just keel over if you weren’t near any light at all. So, I asked if I was allowed to make a HUB for it too, and it was OK’d...so, I did.

So, I finally got to making the base vector for my webcomic’s logo...other little fixes aside. Also, this means that the name of this project is out there. :P

(That said, I have learned that it’s actually significantly harder to make wordmarks in Adobe Illustrator that look like wood carvings than it is to do more curvy handlettering in it. Yikes.)

I finally made a motion graphics version of my thing. It’s alive! It’s also terribly compressed, but eh. I can still say I did a thing in After Effects!

This was a pain to make, though. Predominantly because of file sizes. However, feel free to use it for whenever you’re in an internet argument (although you are automatically losing by virtue of the fact that you are in an internet argument. Never forget that.)

...I just got a glitchy version of the taxes design a few minutes after I posted it. I have no idea how that happened, but here.