up to page 124 is done! 30 more pages and then 10 ish pages of extra content to do :1 if I can keep up drawing 6 pages a week, + nyaf I can finish mid november! I can probably get some proofreading done while I’m finishing content, and I should have a few weeks to revise anything I want to change. I can’t believe I’m actually making this feasible considering how laid back I usually am hahaha. All the page drawing and black and white stuff is making me forget how to colour… except I finished a cg just last week so ??????????? LOL MY BRAIN. I was planning to draw more pages today but I figured I should at least spend ONE day and do something else. But it was a bad decision in the end because I really wasn’t feeling like CGing and I had no inspiration for the cover anyway HAHA. now it’s all broody and dark and heavy… maybe on a better day I can sparkle it up with some desu

In other news we went to a restaurant for my grandma’s birthday yesterday. It was a chinese restaurant aimed towards the more classy/rich non asians, with an objective of “showing the western world what true chinese cuisine is like”. The whole place was decorated in baroque furnishing, except since it was done by chinese people it has the usual unauthentic vibe to it which I thought was hilarious, because I really think regal ancient oriental palace style decoration would’ve looked no less classy, without any of the counterfeit look LOL. The food itself was decent, but not worth the expensive price because I can name a lot of loud crowded and shitty looking restaurants that cook more authentic food, the money paid was mostly just for the service and environment. I should have taken my camera with me because at least for the money we paid I would’ve gotten some nice photos out of it but whatever! Also now it’s making me want baroque furnitures and want to paint my room red LOL my tastes are so old q_q

And here are some more photos from my window! there was a storm near the east coast but as usual, we didn’t get much of it. but storms mean rainbow hotspot yay! it was so bright it was glorious

and the day after the storm was cleared. suppressing urge to photoshop out the trees

I don’t like snacks but these rolls… I was just gonna have one and before I knew it the whole pack was gone LOL damn chinese snacks… I BET THERE’S CRACK IN IT

I don’t recall posting this, I probably have but w/e I have no pictures to post LOL

I BROKE MY COMPUTER by installing a crap load of programs trying to fix my artbook’s file problem. I don’t know what’s wrong with it but it’s either there’s too much shit loading at startup, I got malware, or I’ve been opening multiple huge files in huge programs too frequently recently and force restarting too much whenever it starts lagging to shit. I can’t fix it despite disabling a lot of startup programs and uninstalling a lot of stuff and I really don’t have the time to reinstall windows right now, so I went back to the windows xp I used 2 years ago since I leave that drive plugged in anyway to use for space. And MAN it’s so fast and smooth with an utter lack of bullshit I don’t know what the fuck I did wrong with Windows 7 that could make it inferior to XP LOL… I pretty much have everything I need on there and installed whatever that’s missing, and now I am even more unmotivated to go back to windows 7 cus what’s the point ): just going to wait until no one makes software for winxp anymore or something lmfao

I’ve been having a lot of problems with the artbook but the most important one is finally fixed today. I am waiting for a second proof to be made and once it’s ok I’ll get it printed. It will probably be here by the end of October, but at this rate I probably want to wait for the books to arrive before I start taking orders. I will be gone for a week in the middle of October anyway and I want to wait til I get back to work on this, because I don’t want there to be any unexpected problems while I’m away and unable to tend to it. I am considering fedexing a small number of books after they are printed to bring to NYAF to give to friends/sell but I’ll see when I know the costs/time!

I’ve also been working on the year-end deadline for volume 2, and trying to get ahead of my schedule because I am pretty sure I would need to fork out a lot of time proofreading and editing any problems with the book after I’m done, which I didn’t plan time for. My relative who is coming has two high school and college aged kids and I am now charged with looking into enrollment and credit transfers for them lol ): I also agreed to work on a website for a friend and my dad wants to do some major renovation before the end of the year so all this will probably take a lot of time out of my schedule, so I’m trying to prepare for any unexpected time consuming delays (LIKE THIS ARTBOOK SHIT UGH) but right now I’m only 2 pages ahead ):

It didn’t occur to me that the last time I’ve drawn veloce normally in the story was like… 40 pages ago or something, because I was comparing how I’ve drawn her now to just earlier in this book and I just laugh at how badly I draw people LOL. During most of book2 I thought I kinda settled down with how I want to draw these pages and the change throughout the book isn’t as drastic as book 1 I guess, I should be able to look through my work after I’m done without feeling embarrassed about it right? WRONG HAHA man I’ll never be able to take CP seriously, I’ll just look through it and feel like I’m reading porn in public… I am not even trying to do anything good or out of ordinary, I just want them to look generic and good WHY AM I SO BAD AT LIFE.

Holy crap it’s a non-convention post

I wanted to swap out my manga site and storenvy background with something that looks good and at the same time reflects the story. I didn’t find ANY usable drawings because all the pictures I’m happy with are out of universe, and all the pictures that I can use suck (also amounts to the grand total of like 3 pictures). So I decided to draw something simple and generic for this purpose. I think I got the generic part but LIKE ALWAYS, I failed the simple part and took forever just to finish the lines and roughs lol q__q

The colour scheme and brown light makes her look like link for some reason… I think it’s the green hair ribbon looking like his pointy hat hahaha

And something I doodled at fanexpo! 3 really really old characters (you can actually find a shittyass line up of them in their first incarnation in this blog) that solved my Carciphona plot problem when I made them XD But because I can’t mention them for like another 10 years or something I never had any situations to draw them, aside from the ram girl on my website layout but I fired her LOL. Their names are Stigma, Eqin, and super secret name I can’t mention. The titles refer to them, but they’re out of order so you can guess which one is for which!

I’m just going to airdrop some pictures here and go back to drawing up a storm for my artbook lmao. Otakuthon was good but very weird outside the con due to my accommodations, and I will write about it after fanexpo probably because I walled myself into a deadend and now I have to draw like crazy HAHA. All these three months I’ve really just been planning out the artbook but never did get down to drawing much for it, so now I’m feeling the consequences of announcing a date I probably can’t meet! I usually never do this because it’s not like I have a publisher to appease and I despise putting myself under unnecessary stress, it was really a mistake and bad planning on my part.

I want to be able to open preorders from Sept 1 to Oct 1 because I like nice dates but I don’t know if that’s possible or smart anymore, especially if it is affecting how much I would like to put into the artbook. I could push the preorder back to October instead, but November is too late for shipping since I am worried that it might snow by then. The only concern I have left is any artbook-exclusive pieces that I had wanted to do, but honestly I don’t know how much that would matter for anybody really and it’s just there to make the artbook sound a little better than “here, I printed out pictures in a book come buy it!”, so I might not do that anymore!

I was surprised at how long this took because in the beginning I had pretty much envisioned cel shade/gradients with backlight, but decided to put effort into it because I actually liked the piece, and my cel illustrations actually don’t sell well because they look mediocre next to all my holy shit 30 hour illustrations XD Then I was surprised that I actually got it done for last night (I had to reprint some stuff and today is the last reasonable date imo to send in my files for next week’s convention). It was hard to preserve the texture because the whole image is basically in shadows, and what I’m shading in is only the subtle shadows within the shadows. I had the urge to do very high contrast and definite shading but I was able to keep it down haha

for someone else’s art book!

A commission I did for Setsuna22 at Otakon! She was nice enough to scan it and send it to me since it was one of the pictures I forgot to scan XD This is her OC Deniz I think? I love all the curves on her, it was so fun to draw XD

And cats in a basket is always a good stress reliever

I was looking for a landmark date in my blog yesterday, I never found it, but I did end up reading through a lot of my old entries. Aside from sounding retarded, a lot of them were pretty funny to reminisce on, like that one entry where I was like YEAHHH FIRST YEAR OF COLLEGE CALLS FOR CHANGE, I’M GOING TO SLEEP AT 10PM AND GET UP AT 8 I CAN DO THIS. and then 1 entry later I was like lol fml I’m going insane back to sleeping at 3am. I don’t remember much of the actual events anymore, but I remember my college years being very stressful at times and it was comical to see that transferred into rage posts lolol

And all these plaaaaanns of stuff I was going to do, lists of pictures that I was going to draw but never bothered to, artbooks that I was going to make. I was never a planning person when it comes to this kind of project stuff; if I feel like doing it I can do it even if it’s a big, elaborate project, without writing down anything (like now). I knew this, but I think I just tried anyway to see if they would help me get things done. They didn’t but hey, not every trick works!

Back to now! I’ve been cging like a mofo trying to get stuff done in time; all these conventions really take up a lot more time than they seem because each take up 4 days including traveling, and then another day or two for prep ): and Otakuthon is this weekend! I hope no one jumps up to me and start talking french lol

commission wip! It’s kinda like Heavens 2.0 but only because it was pretty much the commissioner’s request for it to have the same vibe. Happy pictures yay! I am in desperate need of some of these

I spent forever on this boot lol, and it’s not even because it has ornament or anything. I coloured too systematically and it looks soooo out of place in the picture. I spent a bit of time drawing the actual ornaments and twice the time trying to make the edges and shading coarser in order for the texture to blend in with the rest of the picture. This is as good as it got, but I’ll be wasting more time to make it work lmao. It was the same problem in the veloce visrin pic but I didn’t care that much on that pic LOL.

A few days ago the books and prints I ordered from Aurore arrived! They’re so soooo precious and i spent so long staring at all of them and trying to put my fail grade 9 french to use LOL;;;;;; I’m keeping her glorious hand written note forever like a creep wahahahah

*v*

Then today I went out to buy some convention supplies, like stands and binders and stuff, and I came across this ULTRA BADASS BINDER. I was like holy shit this is fucking perfect for my manga pages, not that I show it ANYONE LMFAO BUT I DON’T CARE it was practically created just for me. I’ve been using cardstock paper for most of volume 2 so the old binders I use for CP pages are not thick enough anymore; I have 1 more chapter to go and the poor thing is already bloated. There were only 2 of these in the store though… I hope I will be able to find more when I need more in the future LOL ): pls don’t go extinct badass binders

SERIOUSLY LOOK AT THIS SHIT. These things make my manga pages a lot more epic than they really are. I wish I could bring this to a convention or something LMAO people would be like holy mudkips look at this amazing binder

Ending the long post with my cat. People who I talk to on msn/aim knows that all I ever talk about are my cats sleeping. So here are some pictures of my cat sleeping! Seriously I turn around and there she’d be sleeping somewhere near me.

On the stairs.

In my chair. because she has no fucking bills to pay.