🌱 May report

A bit of a messy month for me to be quite honest, but still working steadily. And to start, I said this last goal was more for June, so I’ll be ignoring it here.

✔︎ Commission progress
✲ Cluaran dev
◻︎ Website updates

✔︎ Commission progress (1/5)

The focus last month ended up being an attempt to bring each outstanding commission to their respective preliminary sketch stage. I can safely say I did manage to do that.

Since sketching is the part that does take me the longest to deal with, that means I’m in a fairly decent position to start knocking these out. I won’t promise I can finish all of them this month, but I will continue to try my best.

However, one of these commissions was a sketch page, so that means I am able to count one finished! I do really enjoy doing these sort of monochrome doodles, so they may be the only style I have open for a while outside of any YCH offers.

I also really ought to focus my personal art to this level of finish for the time being… I hope folks can forgive my general lack of colour while I rekindle my love for drawing.

Lack of colour certainly won’t be the case for these remaining commissions though!
I did open for a single pride bust at the end of May and will be aiming to finish that one with priority this month. Hoping to have fun with the colouring there. 🌈

✲ Cluaran dev

I did cheat a little with this goal, as I’d already gotten some ideas down before I managed to write last month’s report, but I’d wanted to work at it more throughout the month and never did, so I count it a partial success.
After some waffling about, I can at least say Cluaran has settled into being a bat!

His overall silhouette, shapes, physique, et cetera are still things I want to play with, but I’m fairly intent on his tripoint nose, thick eyebrows, and pierced ears haha. As for his palette, I may try to use purple somehow, but otherwise it’s up in the air.

But again, really terribly excited to be making progress with him!

Goals for June:

◻︎ Commission progress (0/4)
◻︎ Website updates
◻︎ Dante+Thalia latex bench

There’s honestly more art on my plate this month than I’m confident I can finish, but I do seem to be feeling a little better, so who knows.

If I don’t manage to finish Dante and Thalia’s piece by the deadline I set for it (June 15th), I’ll go ahead and post the sketch at the $10 tier.

Regardless, hey, thanks for reading.

🌧️ April report

The past month was a necessary break, as I put it. I cut down on expectations and am feeling a bit calmer. Finances continue to be a source of anxiety.

✔︎ Commission progress
✲ Continued project development

I recently grabbed Procreate to sketch on the iPad, as the app I’d been using, MediBang Paint, finally upped its ad frequency to a point I find too irritable to deal with. What particularly frustrates me is I still vastly prefer MediBang’s interface, functionally unlimited layers, and even certain tools to Procreate’s, and I’d happily pay if it weren’t a subscription.

However, they do have an alternate Pro app that does bridge a lot of my concerns, so I may yet have a solution for my iPad sketching. Truthfully, all I want is a decent pen brush, easily manageable layers, responsive transform tools, and a quick flip preview – all things MediBang has over Procreate. The ability to completely customize my canvas UI is a surprising bonus.

If I do use find a use for Procreate, I imagine it’ll be for a different part of my workflow.

✲ Continued project development

Aside from general mental health setbacks, I honestly didn’t do much wrt personal projects because I got swept up in hockey playoff season. Folks on Bluesky may have seen me occasionally yelling about it (en français). The PWHL Walter Cup and NHL Stanley Cup will continue into June, and to be quite honest they have been a Fantastic means to enforce taking a break from art.

I also find watching sports an excellent motivator for keeping up with some very basic workout exercises. If only I could figure out a way to get myself out of bed for regular early morning walks…

Anyway, I did manage to tidy up some project notes in the first half of the month, plus a tiny bit of worldbuilding. Nothing I’d consider particularly noteworthy. I’m trying to organize themes and figure out basic outlines, but the creative well is quite dry. I find this harder to replenish when I’m worrying over finances.

✔︎ Commission progress

While I continue to work at a snail’s pace, I am still working. Many thanks to my commissioners for their patience. 🙇

For April comms, I ended up focusing on dragons, which has been a shit ton of fun. It’s also been quite a challenge! I keep wondering if I should add a surcharge for characters with wings, because they do often up the complexity of a piece, but I always forget to.

In any case, I do think I’ll adjust commissions so that I send the invoice only after approved thumbs rather than completely upfront. I’ll also try to set up YCH comms with the sketches that go unused here, because I rather like them!

I’m thinking you’ll be able to fill both slots with characters of your choice, or you can keep my boy Aodhán for the usual 10% discount. 🙂 Intended for dragons, gryphons, or characters with a similar quad build. I’ll figure out the details and aim to get them up over the summer.

🌼 Goals for May:

◻︎ Commission progress
◻︎ Cluaran dev
◻︎ Website updates

Truthfully, that last point is a goal for June, but it would be nice to get done early if I want something else to do. Otherwise, I’m still trying to keep my foot off the gas to try and mitigate burnout.

Cluaran though? What’s that? He’s a bard from the early beginnings of Aster’s canon who’s gone through a number of changes. He also has close ties with Coinneach! I’m excited to finally be settling in with his design, because he’s a delight and a half to write.

Thank you for reading!

☘️ March report

With my attention focused elsewhere, I didn’t get much of anything done on this front, and I find myself terribly exhausted – facing burnout, really.

Drawing for this account fell to the wayside. Commissions, personal doodles, sketches, all of it – my priority was with other work and dealing with a health issue. I don’t actually find myself regretful over this, though part of me feels I should. I love the work I was able to do for my other account, I love the media analysis and character dev I’ve done in the background, and I had to get this surgery done before things became even more of a problem than they already were.

Aside from that, for much of this month, I found myself desperately, repeatedly, bitterly desiring a break. I may have to enforce that through an hiatus effective immediately. I doubt anyone here wants me drawing anything while resentful and exhausted.

Regrettably, that does mean I’ll continue to leave this pinup of Ares unfinished. As soon as I returned home from surgery, I knew this was going to be the case, but it does leave me a little disappointed.

While I wasn’t drawing, I did manage to dig into some movies and books that have informed a few projects I have stewing. I find, lately, my passions are more easily reignited outside of drawing, and it feels it’s been an age since I delved into my own work with a clear and discerning intent. It gives me some hope I’ll make genuine progress on these stories.

If anyone would like the actual titles I’ve been digesting recently, here’s a list presented without comment: Les quatres cents coups (1959); Le Samouraï (1967); WolfWalkers (2020); Bambi by Felix Salten; The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck and Histoire de Mr. Jabot by Rodolphe Töpffer; Fire Bringer by David Clement-Davies; plus a few others I watched or read in earlier months.

🌧️ Goals for April:

◻︎ Commission progress
◻︎ Continued project development

Two vague goals, the first of which I leave beholden to my energy levels. Perhaps the spring will rejuvenate me. Signs point to my needing a break and a refreshed perspective.

Thank you for sticking around.

🌸 February report

As I predicted, last month was a bit too ambitious for me, but I’ll go through what I did manage to do:

✲ Finish commissions CM12–14
✘ Thumbs for CM15–16
✘ Shibari illustration

✲ Commission progress

Let’s just lump both commission goals together since I didn’t get thumbs done for the ones I wanted to. I am making progress. Just slowly. Slower than I’d like. And it’ll have to continue progressing slowly while I deal with health issues and other obligations. Normally if I can’t focus at my computer, I’ll use my time to work through sketches at my iPad, but things were so bad this month I couldn’t even manage that much.

I did, however, manage to finish one commission, and I’ll say again how much of a joy it was to work with texture rendering and tentacles. I’m pretty much always down to draw some tentacles, whatever they look like. Ideally, I’ll clean up a few ideas to use as tentacle YCH comms, but those are a bit low on the priority ladder.

The current commission priority? Some ropes. Another huge fave of mine.

✘ Shibari illustration

Speaking of ropes, what makes this personal piece particularly frustrating is I’ve had the sketch and rough colours figured out for a while now, and the inks are about 95% done, but I hit a snag and just haven’t had the time to get back to finish it. Honestly, at this point I may end up re-inking the entire piece again, but for now it’s just going to sit on the indefinite back-burner since I failed to meet my personal deadline.

Instead, I took some time to doodle a few silly things from ideas I’ve had penned for a few months.

Sometimes you just need to put your characters in dumb shirts, and that’s okay.

☘️ Goals for March:

◻︎ Commission progress
◻︎ Ares illustration

Slow and steady does it. I think I’ll also be officially closing commissions while I work through my current queue, and I may keep them closed for the time being. $10 supporters can still send an inquiry at any time, but this doesn’t actually apply to anyone at the moment so.

🍻 January report

This is my first monthly report, so I’ll just recap what I managed to get done in January, then go through each item line by line:

✔︎ Set up SubscribeStar
✲ Commission progress
✔︎ New year’s kiss illustration

✔︎ Set up SubscribeStar

As I’ve said elsewhere, SubscribeStar is meant more as a recurring tip jar than a full membership or subscription. I’ll do my best to share regular posts and will at the very least keep up with monthly reports, but something like monthly exclusives or subscriber art raffles aren’t something I currently have the stability to offer. For now, I’m hopeful that even the act of doing these reports will help remind me of the progress I do make and allow another outlet to reflect on my current short-term goals.

Ideally, I’ll also be able to recap any sketches I shared throughout the month, but I basically didn’t even do any this go around, to my chagrin. Well, sketching and ideation has always been an area of art-making I struggle with most. Unfortunately, I haven’t unlocked how to doodle more consistently.

At any rate, in addition to Substar, I’ve set up an account on Tumblr, which I’ll be populating with older work in the coming months. This will necessitate being my most censored social mirror, but it’ll be open for asks and most likely be the best place to browse any long-form lore drops outside of SubscribeStar.

✲ Commission progress

In all honesty, I wanted to finish CM12–14 last month, but the dreary overcast cold of winter makes it quite difficult for me to get much work done – and this is on top of the hectic cycle of US news, which certainly doesn’t help matters.

But I did make progress with a few pieces, and am eager to continue working at them. Each one has presented a fun challenge, and I love seeing and hearing about everyone’s characters.

Lastly, I know I say it often, but thank you to my commissioners for their continued patience. You can always track my current queue through Trello.

✔︎ New year’s kiss illustration

This was finished for lunar new year instead of the intended Gregorian calendar new year, but I did manage to finish it! I’ve tried to keep an unofficial tradition of drawing a kiss for my first piece of each year, so I’m happy I was able to continue that, as late as it took.

Featuring Aster and Damian, this finishes out Aster’s polycule of four – that is to say Aster, and his three main paramours Verisimilitude, Coinneach, and Damian. I hope I can manage to explore each facet of his relationships throughout the year, playing with the varying flavours each one brings.

🌸 Goals for February:

◻︎ Finish commissions CM12–14
◻︎ Thumbs for CM15–16
◻︎ Shibari illustration

This might honestly prove to be too much for February as well, but I will try my damndest to get as much done as I can.

Take care and stay warm!