As always!
Thanks for your patience, guys. See you next week!
Hey There, and Chapter 3
Hey guys, huge long time no see.
Sorry for my disappearance these past few months… it’s actually been a really really rough time for me, just a lot of turmoil in my life that made doing anything really difficult. Lucky for me, that’s going to see a change soon. Which I hope will turn a lot of things around.
That being said, I’m here to give a heads up that Desendi Chapter 3 will start to be posted in a few weeks! I’m aiming for October 16th, I’ll put out an even more formal announcement later.
In the meanwhile, have some photos from the layout book I made. It’s basically just much bigger thumbnails, drawn into a little ashcan so that i can get a pretty good idea of the spreads and the flow of everything. All of Chapter 3 is in this puppy, and I’ve already started transferring the sketches to digital so I can make them pages.
Really excited, everybody. Thanks for being so patient with me. See you guys soon!
Desendi Year End – Looking back and Forward
Hey friends and readers!
When 2018 came to a close, I hoped that I would manage another page before Christmas came around. In the end, the holidays swept me up and I had to put comics on hold to spend time with family and friends. Even a month ago, I know that would’ve made me feel terrible, like a hack. But one development of the past few months, and something that I want to bring into 2019, is to not sweat it so much.
After a few nervous breakdowns, I realized:
My creative work should be fitted around my life. I spent so much time trying to do it the other way around. Unsurprisingly, that made me way more stressed out about doing art! But now I’m realizing that spending time to relax, sleep, and do what I need to do, even if sacrificing punctuality, is often the best choice. It’s still important, vital even, that I get to do my creative work, and I will always strive to find time to do it. But giving myself the freedom and forgiveness to miss an update here and there will do me some good.
This year was slow going: I had a(n unintentially long) hiatus after Chapter 1, and then fell behind on chapter 2. I ended up not making as many pages as I would’ve liked.
But, you know what? I made pages, and I keep making pages! They sometimes go up slowly, but they do so surely, and they’ll continue to. Even if I’m late, I know that they will get done, and I hope you know that too. I’m learning to be more okay with that. Besides, I’ve gotten more than halfway through Chapter 2! That’s a feat and I’m proud of myself for managing to do it around a full-time job and adult life.
This upcoming year, my (conservative) plans for Desendi are to:
- complete Chapter 2, and
- get at least 75% of the way done with Chapter 3 (which, by the way, is already being thumbed!)
But page count is only a small part of it. My meta goals this year:
- Improve my process: finding ‘shortcuts’ that allow me to work quicker, getting more outside help for the parts that sometimes make it hard for me to work, etc.
- Become less of a perfectionist! Be more comfortable with mess, understand that I can clean stuff up later, and that things will always be developing. Basically, get it done and out and stop fiddling.
I am honestly grateful for everyone who’s been reading, and I hope you continue to follow Desendi. But at least for the past year, sincere thanks for sticking around, my guys. It’ll be an interesting road, so let’s keep going.
To end on a positive note, here are my favorite panels from the past year. Enjoy!
Page 12 later this week
Hi guys! Sorry for another delay… winter is turning out to be a weird time, as it usually is for me. I should learn to account for the Holidays kicking my butt! I’ve been really busy with prep for X-mas stuff for both work and family, just trying to get everything in place before I leave town (again) next week.
Page 12 is well in progress and should be up either on Friday or Saturday. For now, here’s a snip of a panel from page 12.
I’ll see you in a few days!
Page 8 will be posted later tonight…
Sorry for another slight delay folks! It’s my fault. There’s a background on this page that I didn’t actually anticipate would take as much time as it asked of me, haha. It’s the last thing that needs to be done on the page though, and just needs another half hour or so before it looks presentable enough. I won’t be able to get to it until later today (thanks a lot, full time job), but it’ll be up for sure.
Have a tiny little snip of the work in progress page in the meanwhile:
See you in a little bit!
Page 7 Delayed for Travel ((Sorry!!))
Hi guys! It’s been really important to me that I try and get pages up on time for this Chapter, but unfortunately this week preparing for a trip and making sure everything else was in order had me a little low on time, and I couldn’t manage to get the page finished before I had to leave this week. I’m heading to Seattle for a sorely needed vacation and while I’m disappointed that I couldn’t get this week’s page to you, I’m excited to go somewhere I haven’t been yet!
I’ll be working a bit on pages while I’m away, which is possible thanks to the iPad Pro and the Clip Studio app, so updates will definitely be up and running again next week, barring some unexpected circumstance (knock on all the wood). Gonna try to keep it to a minimum though (no more than 30 minutes a day is what I promised), since this vacation was specifically meant to try and cut through my usual workaholism.
Thanks for your support thus far, though, and I’ll see you guys soon!
In the meanwhile, have a sketch of Odessa I did from when she was younger for a casual attempt at inktober this year:
Chapter 2 (FINALLY) coming out Wednesday, August 22nd
Hi guys! Long time no see eh?
Life has been really hectic on my end and taking a break after Chapter 1 to recalibrate and plan my course of action for the rest of the comic has been endlessly helpful and I’m excited to come back to it. That being said, I never intended for my ‘break’ to go on 3 months, and I’m going to try and make sure that a break that long (at least an unplanned one) doesn’t happen again.
My new job as a concept artist as well as a lot of new life experiences and unexpected not-so-great experiences has kept me pretty busy. But I’ve been steadily working on getting back to work comic.
I also took the opportunity to work on the story’s writing! I had mapped out almost the entirety of Desendi 3 years ago, and taking a moment to review that story and see if it still said what I’d wanted to say was a good exercise. Making the first chapter allowed me to think over how to tell the story I wanted, and I managed to (hopefully) strengthen some beats that needed some love.
But now I’m back and ready, and Odessa is back and ready, and new friends are waiting in the sideline shadows for their cue!
Desendi returns with an update every Wednesday! Thanks for your continued support, and I’ll see you on 22 August 2018!