TopHeavy
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Weekly Update 6/28/24
🕑 Added 2024-06-28 09:13:09 +0000 UTCI know it's technically Friday, but my sleep schedule is screwed up it feels like Thursday to me. I said in my Daily WIP updates this week that I have no desire to post things publicly right now. I'm going to take a moment to expand what I meant by that.
I've been watching other artists and content creators releasing stuff regularly on Patreon and other pay sites and then releasing a bunch of content all at once. I released pages of Toph Heavy because I wanted to maintain relevancy and drive traffic to Patreon and Subscribestar. That strategy didn't work.
Think of it this way: Imagine a YouTube essayist trying to maintain relevance by releasing 30 seconds of a video at a time. The ideas would be incomplete, and it wouldn't work overall. That's what I was doing. I'm willing to bet that the people here are the ones interested in regular unfinished updates. I assume/hope that's what you're paying for (in addition to just general support) and I feel like giving that to everyone undercuts that support. It's also time-consuming in a "data entry" kind of way. Public release days dominates a chunk of my processing power in a way that is a detriment to my work. So I'm going to take that energy and refocus it in to my work.
With that said, lets talk about what I did this week. Firstly, I really hated this page. I felt like the anatomy and perspective were off, so I completely redrew it.
Before (ignore the lack of eyelashes)
after
I started rendering this page but stopped at the initial blending and moved on to other pages to establish basic lighting. I stopped because it felt too mushy. It still feels too mushy. And I need to come back to it. But I want to maintain some forward momentum. 
I establish lighting with an initial cel-shade pass. All of the stuff I do starts off as Cel-shading because its easier for me to conceptualize how light falls across a form. I'll go back to these, clean them up, and soften edges to give it a painterly feel. 
And that's this week's work. I feel like I'm going to repeat myself a lot as I detail my process but I think that's just the nature of things. Thanks for your continued support, and I'll see you next week.
Comments
Graham
Thank you for all the great art over the years
