Last week I determined that I had a new idea for a YouTube video and was going to pursue it. Now it’s turned into something else entirely. The good news is that I’ll probably still get a YouTube video out of it, but it may take a little longer than a month and a half to get it done. In order to pull this off, I’m going to need to learn and practice a ton of skills I don’t currently have, but hopefully the end result will make a worthy entry in my yearly “big project” record, alongside For Want of a Meal, my Hat Kid invasion, Wakeup Call, and Diamond and Dazzle.

Artwork has been the name of the game this past week. I hit another point where I felt dissatisfied with my capabilities, so I went back to my old stuff to see how, if at all, I’ve improved. I tried redrawing an old character pose at my current skill level and was pleasantly surprised to see dramatic improvements in facial structure, anatomy, posing, clothing structure, proportions, and rendering the character as a 3D object. My old stuff has a certain charm to it that I don’t want to lose, but I can’t help but feel that the medium of drawing monochrome pencil sketches on dull gray paper is hurting my traction. Every artist I follow draws digitally, which makes even the sketching phase more appealing. And if they do traditional, they’re posting finished, colored works that have been lined in pen and prettied up. I can do something like that too, just in vector, after 4-8 hours of work. Not exactly conducive for some kind of daily art post activity like Inktober. I’ll keep exploring solutions to improve my speed and appeal.

I’m about halfway through with my Cosmic aliens. I’ll need to make sure I’m working on one every day for the rest of this month if I want to finish on time. Motivation always comes in waves, so hopefully one of these days I’ll be able to get back ahead by doing two in one day. Really need to budget my time right now since I’m trying to invest so much of it into learning while also maintaining my project work.

Haven’t done too much gaming since I started diving into my new project. Been keeping up with the Wario Cup in WarioWare, but I still need to finish the last world in Mario & Rabbids. As an XCOM fan who avoided it for the longest time since I thought it would just be a dumbed-down version of the former, I am impressed. The people who made that game know what makes a game fun. Hopefully I can learn the same. Make the most!