Brief update today, but still worth sharing!
Was out sick for a bit. Got a few shots and meds. Worked piled up, and also went out of town over the weekend which delayed things even further. As of today, Monday, I'm finally feeling considerably better, but I'll have a lot of work to catch up with during the week. Business as usual I guess.
Term 4
Got started with "Study (copy) 20 feet from photo references (lineart only)"
Just 4 for now, but they are relatively striaghtforward, so these are my "sketch up practice" for now.
I feel fairly comfortable with construction from direct references by now, and doing these exercices is forcing me to take a deeper look at the foot structure, so they're pretty good studies.
Manga
Quite a few updates to share here!
1) Finished the cover art for chapter 30th. Some of you may have already seen it by now.
If I'm honest with myself, I'm not 100% satisfied with it. I feel I could do better, better shading, better highlights, more detail. I still think it turned good, but that feeling that it could be better itched at my head for a while. In the end I felt I was going in circles and decided to wrap it up and move on.
Not the first time that feeling gnaws at my mind, happens more frequently when the head is not all in there (sickness, burn out, work, etc). Still, there are ups and downs, just part of the journey.
2) After that was done, I learned from the manga/comics forum group that the Wild words font I was using actually has a cost for commercial use. It's a bummer as I do hope to do prints or monetize somehow at some point (probably far off but still), but I also learned there's a 100% free font that can be used for comics/manga, komika.
I tried it out and it worked great. Has special characters for spanish (which wild words didn't), and in general I feel it's much better. So I edited chapter 30 to use Komika font instead and plan on using it moving forward. At some point I think I'll have to go back and edit all other existing chapters to use komika if I want to do a printed copy. One of those things you learn in the manga creation learning journey. It kinda sucks I didn't learn about it sooner, but on the other hand at least I learned about it before I even printed anything. Imagine having to discard printed work or have to pay up the wild words license.
3) With the new fonts and support from the manga forum group, I got some good feedback on grammar as well. My grammar in general (english and spanish) ain't that good, so I learned some basic stuff, edited chapter 30, and plan to put more attention to grammer moving forward. The new font allows me to add special grammar characters in spanish, so I can greatly improve that version as well. At some point I might have to review grammar across all chapters created so far, but that's a task I'll put on the backlog for the moment.
4) With everything said and done, I finally was able to upload and publish Nozomu chapter 30 on Webtoon!
Direct link to english version:
https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/nozomu-english/list?title_no=800887
Spanish version as of now was actually brought down due to "inappropiate content". I now recieved clarification that I used some very bad words. So I edited it, reuploaded it, and for now I'm just waiting for webtoon's staff response to see if it's good now or if further edits will be needed.
edit: Webtoon got back to me, and the episode is now restored! yay!
Spanish version:
https://www.webtoons.com/es/canvas/nozomu-espa%C3%B1ol/repercusiones/viewer?title_no=800872&episode_no=30
5) Completed the script for Chapter 31 and currently working on the draft, though with everything going on I'll probably still be going slow for a bit more.
Still so much to do, so I'll head back and keep at it.
