October Went By Too Fast, and So Did September

But hey, I'm back! It's been a busy few months, but also I don't think such a thing as non-busy months exist anymore so maybe I should stop saying that at this point.

Anyway, here's a recap of some things that happened in the last two months.

In September, Victor and I were invited to show Initial Daydream at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. I love any opportunity to hang out with my PIGSquad friends so much--the vibes are all so wholesome and enthusiastic. This was a great chance to showcase all of the cool stuff that everybody's been hard at work on.

It was so rewarding to have people come up to the booth and discover that, yes, the people here are the ones who made the game you're playing! We made a lot of new friends and got people interested in joining our little community of game developers.

At one point during the day Victor looked up and spied Dillon from the Portland Pickles and as soon as he drew near we frantically waved him over and he actually picked up our game and played it for a minute, which was literally the highlight of the day.

I also want to give a shoutout to the team showing their game off right next to us–SUPER CHOPPY is a really fun Super Meat Boy-esque puzzle platforming game with an axe throwing mechanic that is satisfying and also challenging. There was a kid at the expo who genuinely spent almost the entire day playing that game. At the time we saw the game it's only been in development for like, a month. Which is insane considering how much is already there.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/our-next-game-112981822

There's a link to their Patreon there--the tiers are $1 or $3 to support the game as it develops. If those sorts of games are your jam at all I definitely recommend checking it out!

I've been working away at coming up with all sorts of sticker designs (I've already got more in the works, too). It's so much fun to come up with these and even better to see them all printed out and ready to go. There are some big sticker plans coming up in the future for me which has me pretty pumped, but I don't want to talk about them until they're actually finalized lol.

Anyway, I'm really pleased with all of these and how much better and more relaxed I feel my design process has become. I designed the cherries, snail, and raccoon all on the same day! I feel like it used to take me several days to do just one design because I was overthinking everything. Plus I know my digital tools so much better now.

So much of my workflow is digital now and it really makes me yearn for paper. I wish I had a million days off so I could just slave away at my traditional mediums all I wanted, but I'm at least trying to work with what I've got. All of these are just low stakes projects for me to work on where I'm enjoying the process rather than the results (something I constantly need to work on).

Clearly I've been feeling particularly spooky lately, and I have a feeling that is not going to let up in November lol. I've been having so much fun making darker/creepier art.

I also tried linocut printing for the first time and it was sooo satisfying. And a lot harder than I anticipated, not that I assumed it was easy. I definitely want to do more in the future.

I will say, I have another major art goal moving forward and that is to stop putting every single thing I draw in the center of the frame. You can go through the past several years of my work and almost every single one has the subject matter just dead center, and as soon as I noticed it I was pissed off lol. It's so easy to do, and this just means I have a great chance to play around more with composition. It will only make me better in the end.

I'm really excited about my tattoo progress lately--there is so much to learn when it comes to this craft. You have to be managing fifty little things all at the same time and you can really only master it with practice. With each tattoo I do, I notice more of those fifty things click into place and I don't have to think about them as hard because I can feel them instead.

I'm glad I love doing this as much as I do because every time I order more supplies and see the total I want to shrivel up and die, but then I remember that I get to use them to do this amazing thing and I don't feel as bad anymore.

In late August, Victor, Silas, Molly and I were standing around in the dining room talking about how at some point in each of our childhoods we wanted to have our own comics. Apparently that impulse never went away because the more we talked about it, the more we found ourselves saying "we should just hang out and make comics sometime."

And thus, Fourth Sunday Funnies was born. We were originally going to meet up on the fourth Sunday of September, but then we were all hit with last minute schedule changes (that's the day Vic and I went to Retro) and we decided maybe it would be better to wait.

So on the fourth Sunday of October, we finally had a nice, intimate gathering where we made some comics. We started the night with a warm-up round with some silly prompts.

Here's Molly's, for example. It's so good. I should've kept better track of what the prompts were but I know she needed to include a ball of worms and a barber shop or something. Clearly she took that and ran with it, lol.

I'm also a really big fan of Victor's. It's absurd and silly.

Silas, Molly, Claire, and Victor kept working with more random prompts where they were passing a comic around together. Here's how that went:

And here's what I made while they were doing that! No prompts for this one, just following my heart here.

Anyway, this has been a long update. I'm not particularly optimistic about being able to put something out in December but I'll try not to let two full months of updates pile up.

Thanks for reading this far, I know it was a long one! See y'all later.