I have lots of ideas that I want to draw out nowadays but nothing seem to excite me quite as much as before because I always feel like I should be working instead of indulging and taking my sweetass time on a single piece ;; but anyway I felt like drawing some long creepy limbs :1

Otherwise I finished two commissions this week! They were smooth and I actually didn’t struggle too much with them or give up really fast like I did with a number of past commissions. now I’m 6 pages behind my CP schedule haha ;; but at least I finally painted something…………

yeahhh fabric w0000000

Anime North’s artist alley registration date is finally set, and unlike past years it’s AFTER the design contest deadlines. I really don’t want to enter again, especially seeing how it is almost a requirement to draw fandom in order fill up the community spirit quota and to win. But the table application process is just too mercilessly competitive, even with the lottery–or should I say, ESPECIALLY with the lottery, reducing the total table numbers drastically and makes the sell-out time decrease from something dumb like 3 seconds to 1 second. In reality it is one of the most fair and stable application processes around; most cons try to improve every year but end up screwing up the process every single time and making it worse. It’s fair to everyone who wants a shot at AN, but it’s kinda a slap in the face for me (and I’m sure for a lot of other people as well, there are SO MANY AA artists who live in toronto it’s unreal) to have such a convenient, affordable, decent sized and long running con right in my city and I would have to worry about getting denied at the last step. I don’t think I’ve ever failed registering for any other cons for the past 4-5 years, but I’ve never actually successfully registered for AN a single time legitimately (I won the design contest twice and got lucky with the lottery twice)

In terms of other cons this year, I’m considering going to: AX, otakon, otakuthon, fanexpo and NYAF. It would be nice to be able to go to AN, and I might add one or two others if I manage to find some other ones that are close by (:

wow I kinda just… died after new year’s LOL. I keep waiting for myself to sketch up something so I can post it here along with anything else I wanted to write, but I just didn’t draw anything at all. I’ve been busy rushing to finish off volume 3 thumbnails because it has taken far too long, then I started drawing them out right away because based on the pace I settled on, it’s going to take forever to finish if I don’t pick up my pace and make up for the 2 months of break between finishing the last book and starting this one. I’ve also taken my relatives everywhere to get their government IDs and school stuff taken care of since their immigration, and by the end of the day whenever I sit down, I just don’t want to draw. It’s kinda that time where I haven’t finished something serious for so long that I’ve accumulated so much I want to accomplish on the next drawing and end up not being able to do anything instead. I think some inspirational outdoors trip is long due ): So I’ve just been doing random 20-min photo studies instead HAHA (something I’ve been meaning to do for years………………..) hopefully I’ll stop caring sometime soon!

In other news, I watched the second season of avatar! I don’t remember what happened in the first season anymore but I don’t think I liked it very much back then, else I would have had a stronger impression. I did like the second season a lot though, mostly if not almost entirely because of the characters. The story is well thought out and nicely played but there are still a lot of stuff I don’t like about it, so I guess it pales in comparison to how the characters strike me. Whether or not I like the type of character I feel they were really believable. on top of that I thoroughly enjoyed the fact that toph is such a girly character and just not what I had anticipated. And even at the end, after going through so much struggles back and forth, when presented the opportunity, zuko still returned to his original ambitions because even though ideally, a character morphs for the better but realistically, no one can really so easily drop what they’ve pursued for so long just because of a couple of inspiring events, especially someone so young. I wish I could be more brave and persistent in writing character flaws but my desire for balance is way too strong ): I just feel the need to sort everything out and maintain order at any given point in the story. No matter what happens in my story, I don’t think I ever let anything feel like they’ve gone out of control.

now presenting mudkip on his bahamutmobile. My room faces south now so if only I slept at normal times, I would see beautiful sunrises everyday. but who cares anyway it’s just sunrise and not nearly as important as going to sleep at 4am

And Happy Chinese New Year if you’re celebrating! I’ll be having the most festive new year gathering yet tomorrow in just about 10 years, with my uncle and aunt (separate)’s families present! To think we used to have like 10+ families gatherings just because our families are huge LOL BUT I THINK THIS IS BIG ENOUGH. I think I’ll go insane if I went back to the old days…………..

if the seller’s claim is true, I’m pretty sure he never finished anything on the cintiq since he only played with it for a few hours. So this illus is my cintiq’s maiden voyage >u< This is Claret from Teahouse and the full image will be available sometime next year LOL.

But I’ll just say I love the cintiq and I’m so relieved that I do. I feel a lot less inclined to zoom in because of the precision it offers me, and I believe I undo a lot less since most of the undoing I did with the old tablets are just brush strokes that I can’t get to exactly where I want even though I already know where I want them. I can actually scribble now and do faster paint strokes because I don’t have to estimate where each stroke is going. I LOVE BEING ABLE TO NOT HAVE TO ~FIND~ THE SPOT I WANT TO GET TO… even though I’ve used a tablet for 11 years now and it has never felt unnatural (only inconvenient at times). It’s just great that I can pretend I’m drawing on paper; I’m actually glad that I drew all my manga pages on paper with pencil because otherwise I wouldn’t feel familiar with this, and certainly not enjoy this.

I haven’t decided what colour pair eyes des should have yet so he’ll be a rei lookalike for now

I bought a 21″ cintiq! This happened a few weeks ago actually, it’s just that it took over a week to arrive and the guy forgot to pack the power supply so that took another week ): I’ve been meaning to get it since the middle of the year actually, but failed to find any place where I could try it because I wasn’t going to buy something this expensive without knowing if it’s good or not. The power supply delay made it JUST too late though because I had finished volume 2 cover the day before ): luckily this time around, putting volume 2 together in pdf didn’t take that long because oh my god I’m slowly becoming more experienced!!!! so I snuck in some time to try it out in between waiting communication with the printer.

I didn’t get a screen protector because I was just going to do the same transparency thing I had done for my intuos, but I haven’t found a sheet big enough yet so the whole time I was paranoid about damaging the screen LMAO… I also didn’t buy a glove so I just held a piece of tissue paper which worked like magic. It wasn’t brand new (guy claimed it was only used for a few hours and I haven’t found any evidence against that claim yet) so the guy wiped the screen with a wet towel I guess, maybe, so it had some botches on the screen like when you wipe glass, but 2 hrs of drawing with the tissue paper on my hand and the screen is sparkling clean LOL. I will have to find a more ergonomic setup though because it’s way too high up right now and my arm gets uncomfortable… once again I’m looking back at these amazing extension arms from ergotron which cost lot but look glorious. Back then I was a little disappointed because they’re ingenius, but I don’t actually have a use or need for those things. now that I do… I’m finding ways out of it because I’m pretty sure like the screen protector and glove, I most likely don’t need it LOL.

And here’s when I first plugged it in :’D actually I lied it took me forever to figure out how to setup dual monitors even though it was so fucking easy and I was already on the last step. The concept of dragging a window into a different monitor is just alien to me ): and that is the cover for book 2 ! I am so happy with blackbird’s face, I’m not sure how I did it, must be praying to the right gods

In other news I’m thinking of getting a new motherboard/cpu/ram tomorrow, since this store near me apparently has discounts for black friday even though it’s not a canadian thing… it’s just that I spent a lot of money already this year so I somehow feel like distributing the costs over time, even though it would make absolutely no difference and this is actually a justifiable cause. It wouldn’t cost much either since my video card is still pretty good and I won’t be buying top of the line stuff. I guess I can just see it as one of those years when everything suddenly becomes outdated all at once! I won’t need to buy electronics again for a looonggg time. UNLESS someone suddenly invents something amazing and crucial to the sustainment of life, but steve jobs is dead so the likelihood of that happening is pretty low.

It snowed a bit today! Not that I want any until all my books are shipped but WINTER IS FINALLY HERE. And that flower patch I took a photo of just 2 weeks ago? dead HAHA

And I finished the last of the pages! I still have to put the book together and finish extra content/the cover. But man I toned at the speed of light, 12 pages in 2 days LOL;;; I think it’s because I inked them all, then lettered them all, flatted them all, and toned them all. It cut out a lot of of the getting into gear bullshit that I had to go through in the past. I just might consider doing this for future pages, but I will have to wait a while and then read it again to see if the quality suffered from it. I can’t quite tell right now from the 2.5 months of manga marathon LOL.

Ending with some more reflection (:

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