Been a while since I've made a news post, but since this is basically my home, I should probably make an update here with my plans for the year.

These past two months have been packed with me getting my bank account sorted, and reading up on the more complex aspects of running a business. Every time I need to make a phone call, it delays progress quite a bit. I'm a nervous mess on the phone, and it's been a blessing that it only took one phone call to resolve the issues requiring one. All that's left is to acquire my sales tax permit, and I should be set.

Anyways, as of now, these are my goals for the year:

• start & maintain animation commissions
• iron out all the hiccups in my animation process
• make more movies on Newgrounds
• get an actual desktop computer
• learn Japanese grammar
• (dip toes into live streaming?)
• (get comfortable with picking up the phone?)
• (make some animation friends?)

My ultimate goal is to become the best animator I can, which is why I wanna take on animation commissions. Basically I want to outsource the prompts I use in animation practice, as I'm not very creative on my own. I'd also like to find some place in the "sakuga" animation community, so talented people can correct my lacking animation skills.

I have some other major goals, but I'll save the details for another time.

All in all, pretty exciting stuff. I'm already like 80% of the way through resolving my problems, though it might take some time for the remaining 20% to kick in.

I've been really itching to do daily animation work since my last attempt, so I'm planning that out now. This time around, I want to tighten the process. My issue with the last attempt was a lack of pre-production work, and a lack of input from my art studies.

Time budgeting is a pain, but should allow me to fix these issues. There's a lot I want to do in a day, but my days are pretty unpredictable as is. Structured animation work will take the most time, but can benefit from having pauses between pipeline steps. The painful part is allocating time to read, and rest, but I suppose the important part is setting a goal for the animation and accomplishing it.

A structured process should allow for extra renders displaying the pipeline steps, which I would very much appreciate for postmortem review. I'm still planning things out, but I expect to find a good solution between all my needs soon.

I want to quickly get things in place, and push another week or two of animations out before I start work on my first collab animation, which should be in about three months.

P.S. Been having lots of fun sketching in my new Art Alternatives "Very Big Sketchbook". It's alleviated my apprehension of filling pages with nonsensical drivel... so now my brain is free from the pages shackles. Will share sketches sometime soon.

I've been slowly recovering from a bad point in my life, where even the act of making art felt miserable and pointless. You can probably see a lot of that in my first blog post, but I won't look back at it because I don't feel like cringing, nor deleting it.

Now that I have a different frame on my art goals - that being, to become an animator, all the art studies I've been shying away from suddenly look very very fun. Just today I picked up the fine liner pen again, and hit the sketchbook for some work & play.

Damn, does the pen feel comforting, considering it's the first tool I used to practice art seriously back when I was still in school. I retouched on some Drawabox homework I had previously done to get my bearings, and even that felt like a creativity boon. I plan on finishing it for real, so I can finally get my perspective locked down, and improve my draftsmanship in general.

Have some more art books coming in on the topics of creature/character design, color/lighting, cartooning, and storyboarding. I plan on pushing out some simple storyboards/animatics with a focus on utilizing composition and perspective to my best ability.

Finally got a new anatomy art book, and started sharpening my rusty knowledge. I used to study pages of this book - which I'd find on Pinterest - back in high school when I started seriously learning anatomy. Wasn't until recently I found the actual book and bought it. My plateau with anatomy stemmed from the fact that my only art anatomy reference books were either too dry or demanding to brush through. This is the glue I've been searching for to bring all contents of the books I own together and ease my learning process.

Plan on filling up this ancient sketchbook so I can move onto the next couple that've been piling up. This one stretches back years, so I'm eager to do away with it. It's been a while since I've had such splendid study material. I want to polish my draftsmanship and restore my confidence, so I can complete my animation projects.

When I most understood anatomy, I also found it easier to warp a scenes' perspective consistently with the objects within it. I'm hoping to refine that skill as well. I had the most fun playing with weird perspectives and complex scenes.

(Also, yes, these sketches are terrible, but I'm glad to be sketching terribly at all! Now I have more things to refine, and new growth to pursue!)

Damn, I just spent the last two days OS hopping from Artix to Void linux because my GRUB got all fucked after a system update. Happened directly after I posted the last audio. First time doing something like that so I spent most of the time backing up all my files. Luckily Void has an easy GUI installer and I didn't accidentally partition my home folder or anything.

This being my only computer that's worth putting linux on, it was quite scary. Still got some stuff to work on for this install, but I actually replicated my system pretty spot on. I'm back to business as usual as far as I can tell. Was kinda hoping for a reason to distro hop anyways. I feel Void will be much easier to manage than Artix, and the documentation has been pretty good so far. I did spend half a day on just Pipewire alone, but when it works, it works damn good.

It was a nice break from routine. Now I feel reinvigorated to pursue the animations I was planning beforehand (but also, it being midnight, I'm also pretty drained).

Find myself too scared to use the traditional setup, for fear of wasted resources. Need to build confidence first, so I'll probably shake off the rust digitally first. This is an untimed, unfinished animation I did just on a whim. This is the first time in an animation I've paid attention to the lead and curved motions. Feels nice though of course timing and breakdown drawings would help immensely, but this is just practice.

What worries me the most about shifting to traditional is the rough layout process. In digital it is very straightforward and you don't have to worry about wasting resources. It's fast and basically everyone enjoys it for the iteration ability. I'll find a way to get a good mix of digital and traditional work in my process, I just hope the positives of digital don't out-weigh the joy of traditional work overall.

Since there aren't too many traditional animators out there on the web, much less traditional layout artists, it's been hard narrowing down a process that works for me. I've been studying the scraps of traditional work I could find for at least half a year now, building my setup. Ideally I'd go all in traditionally to limit test and such, but paper has become a problem for me due to a lack of registration punches for acme holes. There is one I found for pretty cheap, but only in comparison to the $1,000 ones every other company sells. I'm trying to avoid jerry-rigged setups with single punches because money is fickle and my craftsmanship is shoddy.

I still think I can complete one of the animations I've had storyboarded for a while, though my paper can dwindle fast if I waste too much on roughs, guides, and the like.

Definitely been improving fast lately though. All I need to do is improve my visual library, so I'll make sure to pull up references more when making practice animations and such. Ideally to improve my library I'd travel more to see the world first hand, but that's not an option. Also been working in Blender a bit more. It's a pain, but something I desperately need to learn. Considering where I'm at now though, it's probably best to make my layout drawings usable, then polish up my draftsmanship, and then consider learning more Blender.

Had been waiting on a sketchbook I ordered so I can practice using some Sakura poster color I just got. Plan on using as many traditional animation techniques as I can for my first animation. It might be troublesome splitting up painted assets for the animation since I don't have clear cels to paint on, but I can always digitally split and paint over the images if need be.

I'll have to do a shorter animation than expected due to the amount of paper I have, and the density of the animation I want. I'm saving to buy a cheapish acme paper punch so I'll have easier access to a variety of papers. I've been limited in the amount of roughs I can do because of my short supply on paper, but I'll make the little animation a reality. It's about 30 seconds, and I've made digital layouts in the past, but couldn't finish it because working digitally felt frustrating at times.

I don't like planning out paintings, so what you see is basically a crude sculpture I built up on the forms I saw appearing while playing with the paint. (It's a bit half-baked too, had little time). Haven't painted traditionally in long long time, but these poster colors feel nice and creamy, with no trouble drying nor reactivating. Probably my favorite paints now. The sketchbook is nice too, it's from Leda Art Supply (you should check them out, wouldn't want them to die out on me now).

Thinking on it, I suppose this is worthy of documentation too. My first scanned animation frame. Had to battle my software into giving this to me, though I learned a lot about how to better use them along the way. Just made a simple drawing to practice the entire process from start to finish. Things are either going to get more complicated, or more monotonous from here, but I intend on sticking to my goals. I feel accomplished figuring it out.