I'm home from Everfree Northwest! Hard to believe another one has come and gone. This time I got to hang out with so many cool people, and it sounds like this time around pretty much everyone is planning to return next year. So I think it's pretty safe to say I will be doing the same as well!
Vending went wonderfully this year! I think when all was said and done I made around the same as what I made last year, so I'm pretty content with that. I wanna try making some prints and some new sticker designs so I can have a bigger variety of merch to pick from...although once again, I feel like my best sellers were just my own custom sketch commissions! But who knows, maybe with more merch options I'll net more buyers. Anyway, I'll worry about that in a little while. For now I wanna chill for a while, I worked hard and played hard this weekend and I need some time to recover! Plus I have some more pressing stuff to take care of, including but not limited to freelance stuff, getting various house/car repair work done, and other odds and ends like getting ready to host some friends in a couple weeks when we go to the state fair together!
I think once I'm out of the woods with all those obligations, I wanna get back to work on comics again for sure, but I'm not sure which ones exactly. Admittedly I feel like I've been running out of steam with Hedgehog's Dilemma lately. Not enough to say I'm ending it altogether, mind you!!! But I feel like I just haven't been motivated to do a ton with it lately, so I feel like now is a good time to shift focus to other projects for a bit. For one thing, I'd really like to get my webpage looking a bit more presentable, and I'm hoping to add an art gallery page as well. And I can't really have an art gallery without art, so ideally I'm hoping to get some new, finished art pieces done soon too. And of course, new art means potential new prints, so that's a win too.
Backtracking a bit. Hedgehog's Dilemma will be back eventually. I do want to at least get through the arc that I'm in the middle of, but after that I wanna step back and assess where I'm going with it. I feel like I don't really have any direction for it right now, and I wanna try to make more sense of the characters before I press onward. The characters are all a little too vague right now, and while that's to be expected in a comic's infancy, I feel that I should at least work them out a little more in my mind. I think fleshing them out a bit more, even with some simple backstories, will help me out in terms of writing stories that I find interesting! Of course, I don't want to lose the qualities that people have been enjoying about Charlie and her friends thus far. Their demeanors and personalities will likely remain largely the same! I just want to brainstorm the details that lie beyond the surface level. What makes them tick? What are their likes and dislikes? Do they have any goals and aspirations? What about family members and friends? What is there to do in this world beyond buying food and meeting cute girls in a sketchy convenience store?
TL;DR - I want to make sure I am giving myself places to go, because I don't think I should feel like I've written myself into a corner this early!
What else...I'm not sure. After I get through some last little things for freelance, I'm finally wide open in terms of having time for projects again! There's the comic, of course, but I've been talking with some of my friends from EFNW and we might be planning a little collaboration too...it'll be something fun and silly, and probably mostly low-effort. Something that we'll be working on at our leisure for sure! And again, I'd love to be able to work on some larger-scale art pieces soon. Would love to make some fun little illustrations that I could maybe do small prints of! But I won't get ahead of myself too much. I'm just gonna work on whatever feels right and see what happens. I'm determined to just have a lot of fun with art again!
Alrighty, enough rambling. I'll post again soon! Hopefully next time I update I'll have some new stuff on the rest of the site too. Or a better layout on the main page at the very least. Later!!
--mel