Blog: Mai WIP, shifting schedules, Yearbook slots

Hiya!

This week's sketch is the work in progress version of the monthly damsel, Mai Valentine from Yu-Gi-Oh. Because of the tie in last month's poll, I could get a headstart on drawing her and I honestly really love having such an ocean of time for it. It usually takes a little while to get all of the Yearbook requests for the month in, so doing this gives me a strong start to the month. Obviously, I can't always do it like this, but I think I'm going to start doing the poll right at the beginning of the month as a compromise.

As for the drawing itself, this one's a toughie! Low angles are always a bit tricky (very thankful for the redraw theme because it gives me a great reference), but also the original scene's bindings are so bizarre that I had to think out of the box to make them look more secure. I hope it works.

I said last time that I would open some new Yearbook slots at the beginning of the month. Obviously that didn't happen. I decided to delay it because I knew this month was going to get busy and I was afraid of overworking myself, so instead I'm going to wait until I'm sure I have the time to handle a bunch of new requests. Please bear with me.

I don't know how much anyone cares about metrics, but I really love watching my numbers go up. DeviantArt is still my main art hub despite their best attempts to ruin it, and recently it feels like I've broken some kind of threshold there where I suddenly start gaining a lot of faves and watchers really quickly. That's super cool, but it also means my standards for success have shifted really suddenly. 300+ faves used to be pretty impressive, but now it feels like underperforming, and that's no fun.

It doesn't help that even now, I have a poor sense of what will make a drawing popular or not. Sure, drawing a popular character well and in an eyecatching manner helps, but sometimes a drawing I think will get no attention really spikes while other times something I think will do gangbusters gets a pretty lukewarm reception.

The weirdest thing is probably Yearbook drawings. I usually release them on DA in batches, but recently I put two of them up by themselves and I was pleasantly surprised that they did better than the batches. It could be that they were just particularly good drawings of mine, but maybe people appreciate them more if they see them one at a time. It would be easier to just upload them one at a time like on Patreon and Twitter, but that would get me in trouble with some DA groups that limit how much you can submit within a certain timeframe, so I'm really kind of hamstrung.

Here's what's coming up! At 11:59 PM CEST tomorrow, the poll ends, so vote in it soon if you haven't already! On Saturday, there's the usual live stream. I will be inking Yearbook drawings and I might do a new sketch as a warmup, so feel free to show up and give me suggestions. :3

That's all for now. See you next week!