I’m feeling productive today; the day job hasn’t managed to quash that yet, but the day is only half done at the time of this posting…
I can attribute my good mood to the fact that I’ve finally gotten the latest Fifth Ace Showcase story done; the last page of Martial’s first solo tale will be uploaded tomorrow, but I got it done last night. I also have all the pages for the next story, the one that should have been August’s but is now September’s, all thumbnailed out and a basic script complete. I intend to start uploading that story next week, no break; I already took a break halfway through this past one, so I need to make up for lost time. Plus if I manage to keep to the proper schedule, I should have the whole story uploaded by the time ComicCon Africa starts; I’ll have to get some pages done well in advance, but I think I can manage. I’m dangerously close to having a buffer ready; though I will say this next story has some much more ambitious artwork plotted out than some of my previous ones. I’m going to be playing with perspective shots, crowds, backgrounds… It’s going to be quite the challenge.
I won’t say being home alone has improved my productivity; if anything, it’s just a different set of distractions when it comes to work. It hasn’t been easy on the cats; Silver doesn’t mind being inside so much, but she gets super irritated by Sparrow, who doesn’t handle the lack of space so well. Their time outside is very limited, and sometimes they don’t get it at all if it’s raining, and an under-stimulated ginger kitten can be extremely distracting when one is trying to get stuff done. I think he’s slowly adapting to the routine, but we’ll all be glad when Sparrow is able to spend the day out and about again; if it was summer, he wouldn’t have to come inside so early either.
Productivity aside, I don’t know how much of a break there will be between this next story and the start of Fifth Ace Showcase #5; I still need to pick out which stories I’ll be doing for that one, and there’s a lot of behind the scenes stuff that I want to get done too. I still want to do character profiles for my current cast, as well as the many other characters that will be turning up in future stories; my intent is to have a short time-lapse video of each character’s profile picture uploaded alongside the finished artwork, something I can have on video sites like TikTok and YouTube Shorts for better cross promotion. Unfortunately, this is something I can only do with Clip Studio Paint, which is exclusive to my laptop, which I cannot risk using at the day job without being disciplined; it’s Photoshop doodling or nothing during my spare moments. As such, the character profiles are something I can only do after hours, and that time is taken up by the comic work; I had intended to do all these profiles during my break earlier this year, but life got in the way, so maybe that’ll be my project for the rest of this year after ComicCon? We’ll see; I have literally one hundred (100) character profiles I want to draw; that would be my biggest ongoing art challenge ever.
All this is for the future; right now, I have the next story to finish up, and I am really excited to see if I can pull off everything I want to include. You’ll get to see if I manage next week.
Ciao for now.