Well today was going so well. Did all the mundane things loaded the dishwasher, washed the pots and pans by hand. Made pancakes for the kiddo. Made coffe for the partner. So well.
Project: Todd and the Fae ** Artist Blog **
Worked on the comic, and we know my digital drawing skills have a long way to go but I’ll share how it looks in a bit. It’s going to take some practice and time before these start looking anything like a real comic.
So following the advice of the manga teachers, I’m using some references to help with perspective and visualizations. I’m outlining existing photos that are similar to what I need, and then adjusting it to be what I need and then coloring and inking in the frames. I’m still a complete beginner so please be kind.
I’m probably going to drop the trolleys. The ones in my story are red not yellow, and more wood and fancy. Those are just ugly. The market street that occurs in frame 2 needs to line these buildings and the square, as just a few of the changes I’m making.
The two classes I’m taking to help me with the arcitecture backgrounds and scenes are these:
Architectural Sketching with Watercolor and Ink
A course by Alex Hillkurtz (Domestika Affiliate Link)
Urban Sketching: Express Your World in a New Perspective
A course by Lapin
I’m really enjoying the format and content of the domestika classes, they are a short form class. they cover alot of information in short chunks, and there are practical projects to complete for each unit. I recommend and enjoy there platform. I’ve purchased 25 courses over the last 2 years.
The only thing to watch out for on the Domestika platform, is if your not bilingual spanish/english then pay attention to the the language the course is taught in. Most of the classes have transcripts or subtitles in english if the speaker is using Spanish. However when your doing an art class, it can be frustraitng to follow along with the visual material while also reading the subtitles. The videos are short though, so I watch it through and watch the visuals, then watch it again and read the subtitles, if I grab a course that’s not in english.
Project: Rebecca’s Manuscript ** Author Blog **
Anyway the bad news, turns out my book Rebecca’s Manuscript, the scrivener file for the most recent version (7) is corrupted. My back up on google drive is corrupted. My back up on github is also corrupted. The backup on my backup drive is corrupted too. So yeah. Not happy any more today.
On the upside I’ve lost effort but not everything. I still have the hand written version (6) from two months ago that I wrote on the iPad. I had already typed it and that was the version 7 that I was working on. So I only lost about a 1.5 months of work. Not great but it’s not the whole book. Trying to be positive about it.
Project: Business Plan (2024), quarterly, and 5 year plan update. ** Small Biz Blog **
On to more positive thoughts. I worked for several hours on click up and talking with the partner. Trying to decide what we really need to do to move the business forward, but stay true to what we want to do and create. The master class I took with Rafi and Klee was excellent. They really empasized though that we are creators and artists, and not robots and we need to focus 1st on enjoying what we create, and second on selling it. Then went over all the different ways to sell art without selling your soul. Good people and lots of good information. Trying to sort through it all and make a rough plan. We’ve learned over the years that we are too ADHD to follow a plan, but if we have one, it sort of guide posts us back onto the path we wanted to travel. Rafi and Klee’s master class is available in there artist community section if your looking for it, just ask them, they will help you find it.
I took the HB90 by Sarrah Cannon a few years ago and that really helps with adjusting our expectations back to what’s releastic for the time we have, and our health. Not an affiliate and yes we recommend it. The course really helped, and I can retake it as often as I need to. The reminder sessions help to keep the concept fresh so we don’t try to cram a year worth of effort in 90 days, and 10 years of work in 1 year, which apparently is what I was doing when I first took the course. I’ve learned to tone it back. I use her planner system on my ipad in good notes. I have migraines so I’ve downloaded the white pages as individual images, and inverted them to be back with green or yellow, instead of bright white and pink. It takes a little time but well worth the effort. As for not over packing the schedule, that takes alot of effort. My brain thinks we are still 20 and can do a million things in a day, every day. Reality is that we are 45 now, and it’s closer to 2 hours of hard brain work, and 4 to 6 hours of low energy tasks and then we are done for the day. We have a few days a month where we can’t do much of anything, autism, burnout, exhaustion, depression, migraines, and other unpredictable health issues which catch us. The HB90 helps work all of those road blocks into the plan, so we have a realistic expecations, and know how to handle and adjust when we loose days and sometimes weeks to health issues. The course is open now if your interested check it out. Life time access to the course.
Project: Websites overhaul ** Small Biz Blog **
As part of the plan going forward we are seperating the mess that is our websites, into distinct categories. CraftedByLittleDragons.Net will be for craft and arts only, and this will include the web comic. We are adding word press manga publisher so we can host the comic on our site, it will be a static version. An animated version will be posted on patreon for patreons only.
KidsHideAway.Net will continue to be eduational games, and only educational games.
DragonCode will be a new domain, and website which we will move all of the redm resources, and tutorials to, removing them from the existing sites. I’ll post more about this when it happens.
CrimsonCreek an existing site, but not configured correctly on the current websserver (perils of shared hosting…). It is moving to our own dedicated server and will host all the server data about all of the role play game servers, and game’s we are creating. I’ll post more about that as it happens.
And the final update for the websites. We are migrating all of the sites to a new server dedicated to hosting our websites, databases, and published content. The ionos shared platform has been great, but I really prefer a dedicated box, and we’ve managed to grab a few of there server deals this year, so we can finally move things around. I’ll let you know in advance when the switch happens there might be some down time while DNS transfers but I’ll attempt to mitigate that, we can drop the ttl on the zones and make the switch mostly seemless.
So that’s the updates for today.
p.s. Yes our area of Ohio got silly amounts of snow over the last few days. We are safe, warm, and not shoveling the walk way, cause it supposed to melt on it’s own in the next 48 hours or less. Use your energy wisely….
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