September 2024 Newsletter

Hi everyone! Welcome to... my first ever newsletter yippeeeee

This is something I mentioned starting up back when I restructured my Patreon and created my Substar, and I'm finally getting around to it hahaha. For now I'll just run this as a free post on both platforms, but eventually I'd like to set it up as an email newsletter you'll have the option to sign up to as well. I'll use these newsletters to share any non 18+ work I've created during the month, and general updates. 

Well! September! This has been a big month. Up until now I'd been pretty unstructured in my work routine, which worked fine when I was just drawing, but now that I have a lot of 'admin' type work I need to do as well it was getting stressful... so this month I've started structuring my days. Now I wake up earlier (brutal) but I spend the first half of the day doing admin work and the second half working on Sparks pages (or other drawing... but mostly Sparks pages lol). I'm pretty wrecked tbh. I'm sticking to waking up early but I'm crap at going to sleep on time... but I'm sure I'll get that sorted eventually hahaha. It's definitely way better for getting my work done though, if you're a paid subscriber you might have noticed I completed 12 Sparks pages this month, finally back up from when I dipped down to 9 per month! I'm really happy about this and I think I'll be able to maintain that now. 

I got the first design pass for Sparks volume 2. I'd completed the work for it a while ago, but I ended up doing a last minute spot illustration for the inner cover. It looks great! I also formatted and handed in all the pages for volume 3, and drew the cover! I still need to do a bunch of work for volume 3 though, like the bonus content, a 'previously on' page, author bio, back cover illustration, etc etc... I'll be chipping away at those during October. I'll also be having a meeting with Dark Horse to "discuss future volumes", which I'm really hoping is a positive sign that they're interested in picking up the rest of the series! My contract was only for the first three books, so fingers crossed!

Me and Nauma's (@nauminnnn on twitter, 18+) "ballet yuri" OCs turned one year old this month (happy birthday Ilze & Evangeline). Nauma is going to compile an art book of our first year of development work of them, which will go up for sale (cheap) and I'll also share it to my paid subscribers for free. I drew the coloured illustration of them for the book since I realized I hardly ever do nice big pictures of them... just loads of sketches haha. 

My favourite webcomic, Feast for a King (18+) turned 10 years old this month. I actually dropped off keeping up with it a while ago, but I've been binge re-reading and I'm ahead of where I used to be now. If you read my interviews leading up to the Sparks volume 1 release you would have already seen me being a fanboy about Kosmic's work- but his comics are my favourites and I wish more people would read them and talk about them!! They make me so energized to make comics and I think Kosmic is doing wild stuff with comics like nobody else. 

Actually, mentioning that, I also complained on twitter about how much I hate thumbnailing Sparks and Kosmic ended up showing me how he scripts his comics. Never hold back from complaining, LOL. I've never scripted Sparks before, I always write as I thumb... but I tested it out, and I've scripted the rest of the current scene with Atlas & Marcos. I'll be working on thumbnailing it this month, so it'll be interesting to see if the script helps. I can be pretty resistant to changing my methods but I'm optimistic!

Okay, that's me done :) this is long, huh... I guess I miss having a blog, so these will function as blog posts too. I doubt I'll have as much to share for October so next month's newsletter will probably be shorter, haha...