UPDATE - New Experimental Goals and Such

How's it going everyone? I've decided it's time for another update because I've got some new goals I'd like to share with you all that I'm in the process of attaining. And no, they're not all "projects" of some kind. They're a little more esoteric and ephemeral than that. Here they are: 

1. I want to improve my cartooning skills and general artistic ability - I feel like my skills as an artist and cartoonist have somewhat stagnated over the past few years or so, improving only ever so slightly. I want to change that. Ever since I really started reading and studying all the great information at John Kricfalusi's blog "John K Stuff" (which if you're at all interested in cartooning I highly, highly recommend you check it out), it's gotten me to really analyze my own skills as a cartoonist and improve upon them. I've already learned quite a lot and wish to apply it to my own work. One little interesting tidbit I gleaned from there is if you give your characters specific teeth (as in, not a generic straight bar like most (including me) give them) it makes them look a lot more unique. You can read the article here if you want. 

2. I want to make more original stuff and rely less on fan art - Sure, fan art's fun and all, but lately I've felt like I rely too much on it to garner any sort of attention. It makes me wonder sometimes if people are really interested in what I have to offer as an artist, or do they just like the way I draw their favorite cartoon or video game characters. I mean, there's nothing inherently wrong with that, I just want to show that I'm about more than just interpreting other people's creations, and that I can create my own characters and stories and whatnot. Now that's not to say I'm giving up fan art all together, oh no. I mean, I've been doing it for so long, no reason to quit now. I just don't want it to be the focus of what I do. I don't want people to just think "oh yeah, that's the guy who draws Wind Waker style stuff" or something like that. 

3. I want to vastly improve my creative output - I realize I don't upload nearly as much stuff as I once did. Pretty much ever since 2010 or so when I was working on that secret comic project for the now defunct Zuda Comics (which I might reveal at some point, maybe), I've always been working on some larger "project" rather than just cranking out smaller works more regularly. And mostly it was stuff that couldn't really be shown until the entire thing was complete, and if it wasn't that, it was some ongoing comic project uploaded one page at a time but told a much, much larger story that would've taken literally years to complete. I want to avoid that kind of thing now. I want to be able to upload at least something everyday, even if it is just a quick doodle. Although I might not upload everything here, perhaps reserve deviantART for my better stuff. I'll almost certainly upload them to my Tumblr blog however. 

So what sort of action am I going to take to rectify these goals of mine? A slight change in trajectory, that's what. I've rearranged the priorities of my previous project goals, bumping some down to bump some of them up, as well as add new ones and remove old ones. The one's that got the bump-up were the ones that take the least amount of time to produce. For me, that would be illustrations and comic pages. And those that got the bump-down are the one's that take up the most time, namely animation, video editing, and the like. That doesn't mean I won't do the occasional animated GIF or continue to work on my Thus Spoke Timothustra series, just means they're no longer priorities. Stuff I can crank out at a quick pace is the priority now. Expect some art prints and other stuff like that in the near future. 

Also, you might be interested to know, is that I'm starting a new comic! Bet you haven't heard that one before... However, what sets this comic apart from all the others I've done in the past is that it's a web comic done in the traditional web comic format of story-per-page (or few pages), and not these 20+ page-per-story behemoths I've tried in the past like Stone Punks (that's not to say I'll never go back to that, since most of my story ideas anyway are very long). 

And what exactly is this new web comic going to be? Why, Sir Dufius and the Knights of the Unnecessarily Trapezoid Table of course! I've been trying to get this character and his world established in at least a tiny portion of the collective human consciousness for years now, but to no avail it seems. But I see why now. I've never had the patience to write and draw the myriad pages it once took to tell a single Sir Dufius story. I've never finished a single solitary Sir Dufius story, ever. Perhaps now that he'll appear in much, much shorter stories (ones I can actually finish), I finally will. And since I've been developing him and his universe since 2008, I have a lot to work with, and I'm very eager to share it all with you! 

And that's about it. So expect more illustrations of things that aren't from previously existing cartoons and video games and a new short-form web comic series. In other words, things that can be enjoyed in and of themselves rather than bits and pieces of things to (maybe) come. I'll do my best to deliver on this expectation, though I have been very busy as of late with boring "real" life stuff, but I'll try not to let that stop me.