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I AM SWITCHING ACCOUNTS!!!
Posted 10 years agoIts a slow move while I get set up, but please be advised that I am moving over to 
corablue
This has been a long time coming, considering how ancient this name is and how I've had my new account registered since 2013. I just thought now was the time to do it, before I really invest the time into becoming the kind of page I really want to be.
This doesn't affect commissions, prices, or anything of that nature. Don't fret! And please follow me over! I'd love to have you!
corablueThis has been a long time coming, considering how ancient this name is and how I've had my new account registered since 2013. I just thought now was the time to do it, before I really invest the time into becoming the kind of page I really want to be.
This doesn't affect commissions, prices, or anything of that nature. Don't fret! And please follow me over! I'd love to have you!
Discussion - Commissioners, Artists, and Happy Medium
Posted 11 years agoA FOREWORD AND A THANK YOUAs I get nearer to finishing this latest round of commissions, I keep coming back to the idea of writing this journal. The last 3 weeks I've been trying to make art sustainable. You, my watchers, have made that happen. Full disclosure: in that time I've pulled in about $1,100 USD. That's an insane amount of money and there are a few ways to think about it.
A) It's a livable wage.
B) It's 70 sketches worth of patronage.
C) It's 1/17 the amount of money the site itself pulled in during the latest fundraiser.
No matter how I look at it, I can't help but consider myself incredibly grateful that I get to be here doing what I love and not starve because of it. The purpose of this journal is to determine where we should head next because the amount of ground we've covered already is amazing.
I'M GOING TO FIELD SOME IDEASKeep in mind we're just spit-balling here, but while $1,100 USD is sustainable, I have to make sure I at the very least maintain it. So I'm gonna throw out some personal philosophy here and you guys just tell me where I hit or miss. Let me open up with my sarcasm and get that out of the way. Because I'm feeling snarky, damn it.
WHAT I WILL AND WON'T DRAWThat's cute. Really, it's adorable that some full time artists have managed to be on the internet for so long and there are some things they simply just can't handle. No, I respect boundaries, I really do, I guess I'm just the odd one for not turning away business. Maybe I'm being cavalier, but this is my honest attitude. Want it? Sure, okay.
ADOPTABLESThis whole notion of character copyright that has been around since the early days of DeviantArt is laughable at best. Someone could take Blue, draw her, claim her as their own and there would be literally zero things I could do about it. And I've come to terms with that, but I don't play that system for money. I will never do adoptables. Why? Because each one of you could go into my gallery, take a character, draw it and say, "original character do not steal," and I would either never notice or regard it as fanart and move on without making stupid accusations that waste my time and resources. If you can make something out of my creations that I couldn't, you were the better business person to begin with I suppose.
YOUR CHARACTER HEREThis I like. I've never done them but I might in the future. It just seems so elegant. Gee, I have some free time but no commissions in the backlog. Well I'll just do a commission in advance. The commissioner knows what the picture will look like, which is a load off their shoulders, and I've turned my time that would have been worthless into cash.
CHANGING PRICESI haven't changed my prices in a year and a half. Changing this is never popular. In fact, I'm not sure it's popular with me. I like where I am. I've looked. It's HARD to find a decent sketch for $15. But I need to get more colored, finished art in my gallery in order to attract people in the future. To that end I may increase the price of sketches in order to lower the added cost of color. It's really a tradeoff and something I'm interested in engaging you, the watchers on. Think my prices are too much? Tell me that if you think so, too.
DAILY STREAMSI want to do this. I am unaware of anyone at the very upper echelon of FA who stream daily or semi-daily. I don't know of anyone period - besides a few close friends - where I can say to myself, "Are they streaming right now? Well it's 3 PM on a workday so they probably are." That shocks me. To be frank, I make all my donations streaming. I feel like this is just a lost opportunity. I almost pale to think of how much money I'd make if I was Kanel, Faust Sketcher, or Faint and streaming every day. Once I fix my 2Mb upload over wireless disaster, I'm doing this unless for some reason its terribly unpopular.
PATREONIt is no secret to me that Critical Condition is popular. Its been reposted countless places. I've seen dozens of people ask for sauce because its been recycled often enough people just don't know where I am. I'm not making a point about reposting or piracy here, or if I did I'd say please repost more because it's been great for me. The point is that a lot of people want to see it continued. Currently I'm in a situation where I can do personal projects and make nothing, or do more commissions and make something. The math isn't hard to figure out. But Patreon and places like it are a paradigm changer. The only reason I'm resistant is because everyone is doing it at the top. Am I worth as much as InCase? At some point doesn't it start to feel like e-begging? I'm not sure. But this option allows me to give you all content that everyone loves on a reliable repeating basis. If it didn't I wouldn't even list the option here.
OTHER PRODUCTSMeesh sells $6 comics. That's neat. And I have a feeling it works pretty well. Right now if I do a 10 page comic (I'm working on one right now) I get about $300-450 depending on if its toned or not. So I have to ask myself, instead of Patreon would 75 people buy Hi-Res + Photoshop files of Critical Condition? Is it better to ask for money for a finished product or for a smaller more crowdfunded donation on a monthly basis? Are there other things I could sell, like private streams?
DISCUSSIONPlease let me know what you think, commissioners. I could really use your input. Are there methods I haven't thought of? What should I work on most? Is my skill not to professional standard at all? I mean really, if there was a time to be even overly-honest, this is it.
Sorry for taking so much of your time, but this would be really valuable to me.
Ooof. Not Feeling Well
Posted 11 years agoSorry guys. Woke up pretty miserable today so the stream is postponed until tomorrow. I guess this serves as an advanced notice. Woo, silver linings.
So tomorrow I'll be working on comics for Maou, Reklaw, and Cischiral. 3 draft pages are already done. After that I have some work to do for https://www.kickstarter.com/project.....-svnt-dracones
If I'm forgetting you and I owe you something please note me. I'm not all there right now. <3
So tomorrow I'll be working on comics for Maou, Reklaw, and Cischiral. 3 draft pages are already done. After that I have some work to do for https://www.kickstarter.com/project.....-svnt-dracones
If I'm forgetting you and I owe you something please note me. I'm not all there right now. <3
FA Downtime, Critical Condition and Other Thought Garbage
Posted 11 years agoCRITICAL CONDITION AND FULL TIME WORK
As some of you may have caught in the last two weeks visiting my streams, I've recently made the move to full-time artist. As I make the move from hobbyist projects to full scale professional quality stuff, there are some huge issues I'm running into that I never would have anticipated. Firstly is the RAM required to have open several comic pages at once running 600 DPI. I've lost work twice due to crashes, though I'm saving incredibly frequently now, though at file sizes that large it takes 10 seconds just to save (It's more annoying than it sounds). Secondly, being that I create manga and use tones, the moire effect is causing me a lot of headaches. What is the moire effect? This.
http://i.imgur.com/Jwl4VhB.png
The top image is STILL shrunken down. The original is 4x larger. When you scale down images with interference patterns that far, you get the moire effect. If you've got good software, generally it will have several mathmatical options for dealing with the moire effect, two of which are shown here, but you have no way of knowing how it will look until you save each page at the desired resolution individually to make that assessment. In the example, the first option is at least passable while the second is atrocious. And I'm having to do that with every tone, with every image I produce.
There are way more examples, and I could even go into how I need business hours, tons of notes, and a calendar just to manage commissions now, but the point is there are birthing pains associated with the begginning of my full time art career. It is in no way deterring me, but this week? Whew, baby! Making me earn every cent of my income. New respect for people who also do this full time, no doubt. Believe me, people who post personal art here, take commissions and also find time to post to paysites are working over 50-60 hours a week if I had to guess.
What is the result of all this work? Well, if you bother to read my journals you probably deserve a cookie. I can't fit cookies through the internet pipes though, so have this instead.
http://i.imgur.com/GTNtXsc.png
Can I promise I'll redo the entire first chapter? No. This was an experiment in professional quality work that revealed a lot of flaws in the original, up to and including terrible resolutions, sloppy shading, poor use of space and panel flow, lazy panels, and bad perspective. I didn't know what a register mark or A5 and B4 paper was. I didn't know how to create a recognizable character or anything about propotions. I've even redone a FEW pages and I got LUCKY here. In every other page, I've had to redraw whole panels because they were so awful. And I haven't even gotten to the end where I went full Lazy Mode (sad but true).
FA DOWNTIME AND /CONSPIRACIES/
Well welcome back everybody. Wild ride, eh? I don't know about you, but this downtime has made me extremely nervous. I'm not going to contribute a ton of time to this, but here is a timeline of the events of this past week.
http://i.imgur.com/iotRP0X.jpg
So needless to say there are some extremely important questions about this that I want answered. To me this is a serious situation.
-How reliable is a place like FA to depend on for interacting with customers?
-How could you possibly create a GoFundMe page to move FA to the cloud hours before the DDoS attack?
-Why with a GoFundMe page at your disposal would you not to link it for 3 days despite being asked?
-Why the price jump from $200 a month for better DDoS protection to a $25,000 lump sum?
-Which is obviously mostly for server upgrades and Phoenix development?
-Why would nobody claim responsibility for an attack of this scale?
-Why did FA come back immediately after you started being funded?
EDIT: Also why this you totally oblivious moron? http://i.imgur.com/bmx7AaQ.png
I could answer most of these questions if I was making baseless accusations, but I won't. Yes, the DDoS attack happened. The big question now is who attacked. Regarding the GoFundMe page being created just hours before the attack began, there are two possibilities.
1. This is the unluckiest coinscidence of all time and Dragoneer is just telling a white-lie to take advantage of a bad situation, saying that all this money is to move FA into the cloud, when it's actually for server upgrades and Phoenix funding.
2. Dragoneer knew about the attack in advance in some fashion, and took advantage of the situation to make some dollary-doos.
Keep in mind I'm not painting anyone guilty here, but even if we assume the best of Dragoneer in that this is all a coincidence, you still have to buy that he created a GoFundMe page for unrelated server upgrades and Phoenix development which he had on hand even before FA went down and linked or mentioned it nowhere, that he used the DDoS attack as a catalyst on purpose to fuel that campaign, and is being disingenuous at best when he claims it's for cloud migration. $25,000 is good for FA if it means better servers and capabilities, but the ends don't justify the means and raising money under false pretenses is still wrong. If it comes to light that FA is doing one worse and creating false flags to extort its users I would probably pay much closer attention to FA developments in the future as I take this kind of thing very seriously. Nuff said.
Drop me a comment to let me know what you think, or call me a crazy sexy smut-producing raving lunatic (emphasis on sexy). What do you think about this FA bologna? What do you think about the possibility of a professional quality doujin out of me?
As some of you may have caught in the last two weeks visiting my streams, I've recently made the move to full-time artist. As I make the move from hobbyist projects to full scale professional quality stuff, there are some huge issues I'm running into that I never would have anticipated. Firstly is the RAM required to have open several comic pages at once running 600 DPI. I've lost work twice due to crashes, though I'm saving incredibly frequently now, though at file sizes that large it takes 10 seconds just to save (It's more annoying than it sounds). Secondly, being that I create manga and use tones, the moire effect is causing me a lot of headaches. What is the moire effect? This.
http://i.imgur.com/Jwl4VhB.png
The top image is STILL shrunken down. The original is 4x larger. When you scale down images with interference patterns that far, you get the moire effect. If you've got good software, generally it will have several mathmatical options for dealing with the moire effect, two of which are shown here, but you have no way of knowing how it will look until you save each page at the desired resolution individually to make that assessment. In the example, the first option is at least passable while the second is atrocious. And I'm having to do that with every tone, with every image I produce.
There are way more examples, and I could even go into how I need business hours, tons of notes, and a calendar just to manage commissions now, but the point is there are birthing pains associated with the begginning of my full time art career. It is in no way deterring me, but this week? Whew, baby! Making me earn every cent of my income. New respect for people who also do this full time, no doubt. Believe me, people who post personal art here, take commissions and also find time to post to paysites are working over 50-60 hours a week if I had to guess.
What is the result of all this work? Well, if you bother to read my journals you probably deserve a cookie. I can't fit cookies through the internet pipes though, so have this instead.
http://i.imgur.com/GTNtXsc.png
Can I promise I'll redo the entire first chapter? No. This was an experiment in professional quality work that revealed a lot of flaws in the original, up to and including terrible resolutions, sloppy shading, poor use of space and panel flow, lazy panels, and bad perspective. I didn't know what a register mark or A5 and B4 paper was. I didn't know how to create a recognizable character or anything about propotions. I've even redone a FEW pages and I got LUCKY here. In every other page, I've had to redraw whole panels because they were so awful. And I haven't even gotten to the end where I went full Lazy Mode (sad but true).
FA DOWNTIME AND /CONSPIRACIES/
Well welcome back everybody. Wild ride, eh? I don't know about you, but this downtime has made me extremely nervous. I'm not going to contribute a ton of time to this, but here is a timeline of the events of this past week.
http://i.imgur.com/iotRP0X.jpg
So needless to say there are some extremely important questions about this that I want answered. To me this is a serious situation.
-How reliable is a place like FA to depend on for interacting with customers?
-How could you possibly create a GoFundMe page to move FA to the cloud hours before the DDoS attack?
-Why with a GoFundMe page at your disposal would you not to link it for 3 days despite being asked?
-Why the price jump from $200 a month for better DDoS protection to a $25,000 lump sum?
-Which is obviously mostly for server upgrades and Phoenix development?
-Why would nobody claim responsibility for an attack of this scale?
-Why did FA come back immediately after you started being funded?
EDIT: Also why this you totally oblivious moron? http://i.imgur.com/bmx7AaQ.png
I could answer most of these questions if I was making baseless accusations, but I won't. Yes, the DDoS attack happened. The big question now is who attacked. Regarding the GoFundMe page being created just hours before the attack began, there are two possibilities.
1. This is the unluckiest coinscidence of all time and Dragoneer is just telling a white-lie to take advantage of a bad situation, saying that all this money is to move FA into the cloud, when it's actually for server upgrades and Phoenix funding.
2. Dragoneer knew about the attack in advance in some fashion, and took advantage of the situation to make some dollary-doos.
Keep in mind I'm not painting anyone guilty here, but even if we assume the best of Dragoneer in that this is all a coincidence, you still have to buy that he created a GoFundMe page for unrelated server upgrades and Phoenix development which he had on hand even before FA went down and linked or mentioned it nowhere, that he used the DDoS attack as a catalyst on purpose to fuel that campaign, and is being disingenuous at best when he claims it's for cloud migration. $25,000 is good for FA if it means better servers and capabilities, but the ends don't justify the means and raising money under false pretenses is still wrong. If it comes to light that FA is doing one worse and creating false flags to extort its users I would probably pay much closer attention to FA developments in the future as I take this kind of thing very seriously. Nuff said.
Drop me a comment to let me know what you think, or call me a crazy sexy smut-producing raving lunatic (emphasis on sexy). What do you think about this FA bologna? What do you think about the possibility of a professional quality doujin out of me?
Moving In Friday (Hopefully)
Posted 11 years agoAfter a cross country trip and weeks in a hotel room with my equipment in storage, I may be moving into the new house on Friday! I am so sick of being cramped into a room with 5 other people with only my laptop that I could spit! So looking forward to getting back to art.
New York. Not sure what to think of it yet. Syracuse is definitely a train tracks kind of town. The mall is one of the most elaborate things I've ever seen. There's practically an amusement park on the top floor. But its obvious that most places surrounding downtown are pretty poor. People are friendly as shit so far, at least the people I've met at the coffee shops, hookah lounge, etc. Diverse as shit ethnically, that's pretty cool.
I just spend 3 hours trimming years worth of overgrown hedges back so the side of the house was visible. I'm exhausted.
New York. Not sure what to think of it yet. Syracuse is definitely a train tracks kind of town. The mall is one of the most elaborate things I've ever seen. There's practically an amusement park on the top floor. But its obvious that most places surrounding downtown are pretty poor. People are friendly as shit so far, at least the people I've met at the coffee shops, hookah lounge, etc. Diverse as shit ethnically, that's pretty cool.
I just spend 3 hours trimming years worth of overgrown hedges back so the side of the house was visible. I'm exhausted.
Update for those of you asking
Posted 11 years agoWow. So, I had journals all the way back to when I was 19. Got rid of those. I'm probably gonna keep one journal at a time up here.
Anyway, most of you might have heard but I'm in the middle of a cross country move right now. From California to New York. I'm stopped in Colorado now. So it'll be a week or two before I'm back on my feet. Yes, I already moved once. Lost my job, moved in with my parents temporarily, my mom lost her job, we're all moving again together. Fun times.
Some of you have offered charity or payment in advance for commissions. I had to turn you down. Its a point of pride for me that I don't rip people off, and the last time someone wanted to pay me in advance anyway, I moved twice and still haven't finished. So thank you kindly, but I'm fine. I'll be happy to have you as customers when I get set up in a new office.
Stay cool kids, I'll be back before too long.
Anyway, most of you might have heard but I'm in the middle of a cross country move right now. From California to New York. I'm stopped in Colorado now. So it'll be a week or two before I'm back on my feet. Yes, I already moved once. Lost my job, moved in with my parents temporarily, my mom lost her job, we're all moving again together. Fun times.
Some of you have offered charity or payment in advance for commissions. I had to turn you down. Its a point of pride for me that I don't rip people off, and the last time someone wanted to pay me in advance anyway, I moved twice and still haven't finished. So thank you kindly, but I'm fine. I'll be happy to have you as customers when I get set up in a new office.
Stay cool kids, I'll be back before too long.
