Well that was unexpected! A huge thank you to the wonderful @tydaze for gifting me a month of Supporter status, you're too kind!

This guy:

Good job Goomy! I'm *sniff* so proud!

Thank you @SpikeyBlum for suggesting this gooey little fella in the Art front page suggestion thread, much appreciated!

It might seem unearned, and maybe a little bit ridiculous, to do a 2023 recap considering I only joined Newgrounds roughly two-thirds into the year. But then again, I treat my news posts as a digital diary, an archive of my presence on the site that I can return to when I wish and note all the milestones that happened along the way. So, it makes sense to round off the year with an entry summarizing what I consider the highlights of my journey so far.

All in all, I posted 12 pieces since joining in late August, and I am humbled by the fact that two of them made it to the front page of the art portal.

The first was my entry to the Sweet Sixteen Comic Contest, the first (and hopefully not the last) contest I took part in. I’m incredibly proud of my little spider guy for getting me my first frontpage, gathering plenty of ratings and favorites, and earning some wonderful comments that I still reread from time to time.

The second was Mateja’s coming out, and this comic getting featured means more to me than I can put in words. It was an interesting road getting there: when I joined Newgrounds, the art portal update was still waiting in the wings, so I had to post all the pages separately. Once multi-art posts became a thing, I started considering re-posting the whole thing as a single entry, which I finally did in late November. Then, practically on a whim, I posted it in a forum thread for art that has less than five votes to give it some more exposure. This led to it being noticed, suggested in the frontpage thread, getting featured, and becoming my most viewed piece by far. All from a spur-of-the-moment decision! If you’ve read the (long) description of this comic, you already know how much it means to me, so having it be my most successful art portal entry so far just feels so right for lack of a better word. If you’ve read, reviewed, or favorited either of these two comics, thank you so much!

I’m also slowly peeking out from the shell I carry over my back like a good little introvert and giving collaborations a try. This year I joined my first collab – The Pokémon Mystery Lovers Collab – which will be going live in February 2024. Creating my entry was a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to joining other collabs if they tickle my fancy.

Right now, I still feel like I’m slowly building up my own distinct identity as an artist. There are a lot of different tendencies that are pulling in their own directions. I love the natural world and sciences in general, but I also love exploring every aspect of the gay male experience. Sometimes I want to make stuff that is very introspective and personal, sometimes I just want to do NSFW stuff. I like making longer stories with more elaborate plots, I like making very short comics or stand-alone illustrations. I feel like some of these interests are starting to coalesce into a more unified whole, something that more clearly says “that’s me!” in an artistic sense. I’m pretty sure I’m still a long way off from getting there though, but I’m still excited to see where that road takes me.

To all of you who have followed me, reviewed my work, left comments on my news posts, sent encouraging DMs, added me as a friend, suggested my stuff be featured, or interacted with me in the forums: I deeply appreciate you, and I’m not just saying that. You’ve literally been one of the most rewarding parts of my experience so far. Being quite shy and lacking self-confidence, I never really managed to find my own niche in most online communities. I was part of them, but never truly felt I belonged in them. Something about Newgrounds feels different, and it makes me hopeful about my future on this site.

To round this post off, here’s a screengrab of my profile stats at the time of this writing:

I don’t know what’s waiting around the corner, but my wish is to stick around on NG long enough to make another one of these posts next year. To take another screenshot of my profile stats, compare it to the one above, and be able to say: “It was a good year, wasn’t it?”

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading this, and happy holidays!

vlsrb

Let's do it right this time around.

It's no secret that I can be... awkward in social situations. There are times when I literally need to have something spelled out for me in order to figure out the way it should be done. This is why I sometimes don't react in a proper and timely manner to things that call for it... such as having my work frontpaged on Newgrounds. So here I am, typing this news post to make amends.

Mateja's coming out, a short comic I did back in 2019, was featured on the front page today, and I find it hard to put in words just how much this means to me, how content I feel as I'm writing this. I literally poured myself into this comic, and I will probably always consider it one of the best things I ever created. @Yolkbyte, thank you for mentioning it in the Art Front Page Suggestion Thread. I deeply appreciate the fact that you felt it deserved more attention.

Which brings me to the next issue: this is not the first time a work of mine was frontpaged. My Sweet 16 Comic Contest entry also got featured; thus I owe an overdue "thank you" to @Madmazel for, once again, suggesting it in the forums. Seeing my little comic in between other works that seemed far superior to it, and realizing that someone thought it was worthy enough to be featured, made me giddy like a schoolgirl for days.

Finally - and let me try to do this without being too weird - I owe a very overdue "thank you" to the person who scouted me back in September, when I was still a Newgrounds hatchling. When I made my own art thread and started posting my works, @PerKGrok was one of the first people who commented on them, always providing encouragement and helpful feedback. Needless to say, when I got the notification that I was scouted, it wasn't too difficult to figure out who was responsible. Thank you for your support and for believing I deserved to be scouted.

Lastly, to all those in my followers list, thank you for clicking "follow"! There aren't a lot of you at this point, but I'm grateful for each and every one of you. Hope you'll like my future scribblings as well.

I did it! I’ve completed my entry for the Sweet Sixteen Comic Contest!

Just so I can have a summary of the process, here’s how it went:

Pencilling – October 1st to October 21st

Inking – October 24th to November 11th

Shading/coloring – November 12th to November 21st

Scanning/lettering/finishing touches – November 21st to November 23rd

I have mixed emotions at this point. There’s a lot that I could have – and should have – done better. But in the end, I can honestly say I’m proud of myself for taking on the challenge, sticking to the schedule I laid out, and finishing the comic in time.

So here it is at last:

If you happened to click on the link and read the comic, I hope you enjoyed it.

When I last posted on my progress, I was just shy of being halfway through sketching the 16 pages of my comic. Flash forward to now and here's where I stand:

Phase 1: pencil all the pages - COMPLETED

Started on October 1st

Finished on October 21st

Phase 2: ink all the pages - ongoing (12 of 16 pages complete)

Started on October 24th

Phases 3 and 4: shade/fill all the pages + scanning/lettering/finishing touches - upcoming

Honestly, I don't think it could have turned out any better. I was half-expecting to get sidetracked at some point and fall behind the schedule I had laid out for myself. My motivation is running pretty high and I hope it stays that way until the final stretch.

At my current pace, inking should be done by the end of next week, at which point I'll start with the shading and filling. I'm slightly nervous about this part because some of my brush markers are running low. This wouldn't be a problem if said markers weren't impossible to find in my local art stores - it seems they're not getting them from their suppliers anymore, which isn't great for me. I'll have to be really careful during the third stage so as not to use up any of the markers in the middle of work; if that happens I'll have to improvise and finish the job with a different shade, and it's not going to look pretty.

Nevertheless, the next time I do this update, it will be to post the finished comic, and I'm very excited about it to say the least!

Think of this news post as a kind of diary entry that serves to document my progress and help me motivate myself by clearly laying out what I've done and what I still need to do.

So! The Sweet Sixteen Comic Contest kicked off last month. Now, I love comics and I've been drawing them for as long as I can remember, but in spite of this I was reluctant to throw my hat in the ring. It's not easy telling a self-contained story in only 16 pages, much less so when there's a deadline looming over your head. But in the end, I decided to take up the challenge and give it my best try. If nothing else, I'll have the sense of accomplishment that comes with finishing something within a limited timeframe. That's not a bad thing at all if you ask me.

Having made the decision to create an entry, the first thing I needed to do was come up with an idea. Fortunately for me, I had the benefit of a huge pile of rough story ideas that I had lying around in my mental file cabinet - I figured it would be best to use one of them as a basis for the comic, instead of coming up with something totally new. My first idea used characters from a novel I was writing a few years ago, and while I liked the story I could feel that my heart wasn't in it. I moved on to a different idea set in the universe of another novel I worked on at some point, and while this story was firmly in my comfort zone it was also very similar to a lot of other things I've done in the past (including this comic I posted here on Newgrounds). I felt like it would have pigeonholed me, so I gave up on it after four pages of rough drafts. Next, I considered whittling down a longer comic from earlier this year into a more compact story that would remove all the fat and get to the point quickly. I took my written script for said comic and extracted the part I wanted to use, then re-wrote it to make sense as a stand-alone story. This idea got the green light, and by the end of September I had finished the rough draft of all 16 pages.

With everything ready, I started work on the actual comic on October 1st. Instead of doing a full page (pencils + inking + fills/shading) and then moving on to the next one, I decided to divide my workload into four stages:

1) pencil all the pages

2) ink all the pages

3) shade/fill all the pages

4) scanning, lettering, finishing touches

At the moment I'm still in phase one. With my current schedule, I can only work on the comic five days a week, and only in the evening if it's a working day. Doing the pencil sketches is the most demanding and time-consuming part of the job, so I've settled on doing one page per day, which translates to five pages a week. As I'm writing this, seven pages have been fully penciled. I'm very pleased to say that I'm sticking to my one-page-per-day schedule so far; if I keep it up, I'll have all the pages sketched by the end of next week. The remaining parts of the process are less complicated, so I'm pretty confident I'll be able to finish everything on time.

And that's about it. I'll do another one of these in about a month, when I will hopefully be deep into the inking process!