Monthly Report: December 18th, 2022 (Patreon)

Happy Holidays! I absolutely despise the end of the year, as everyone tries to cram months worth of missed interaction into such a super short span of time.

So, what's new? First of all, you might've noticed that Weekly Updates are really anything but- it used to be that I would post them when I felt like I'd done 'enough' to make them worth it, after I got to a point in my workflow where I wasn't really getting things done as often as I wanted. And then that stagnated even further, due to a variety of issues mostly pertaining to a long-form burnout, or whatever was going on. Either way, you'll notice they don't really happen anymore; and to take the stress off my back, I think I'm probably going to keep updates to the patreon discord server. I'm sorry if this is annoying or frustrating, but at least updates are getting pushed there. Weekly releases might once again return, if I can get to a point where I'm happy with it and don't just have one or two small things per update, like I currently do.

Animations take a lot of time, planning, fiddling, ideas- what used to take no time at all now takes something like a full stream's worth of time, approximately two hours, now that I put more effort into it. Part of me ponders if it's even worth it to put the extra effort in, really; sometimes I wonder if it'd be better to just do shorter and simpler animations, where I don't have to basically work with hundreds of keyframes per animation or what have you. That's... mostly just me musing, though. I apologize, I'm writing this report pretty late while it was still on my mind.

Speaking of streams! I'm going to attempt to get a stream schedule set back up and do my best to stick with it. I feel like lately I've been making good strides to get back into animating, and part of that is getting back into the habit of streaming. 

The current stream schedule is tentatively 7-9PM CST every Tuesday and Thursday, over at https://picarto.tv/alsnapz !

So, what have I been working on lately?

Devalo the Anjanath, of course! This big greedy rex has honestly been a lot of fun to work on; if you haven't been keeping track, their big theme is mostly going to be mawplay. As of right now, I think there's SIGNIFICANTLY more animation of Helix in Devalo's mouth than in their gut; I've still got a few plans here and there for them, and I'm honestly kind of excited to get to it and get it working. It'll be similar to what went on with Sandoval with code-controlled clips, since honestly I love that so much, just with less control since I found that to be kind of a pain to deal with and animate. Sometimes, less is probably more.

Golly gee I sure do hope that Patreon doesn't get on my case and cancel my account for pictures like this!

Folks have also poked about Isolda, and honestly I really should just bunker down and get her done. I'm going to be kind of busy with life stuff in the next short bit here, since Christmas is just *the best time of year*, but I will definitely try to find the time to get her finished up for the folks that have been pining for her. She really only needs a few more animations on the lay-down route, and she'd be good to go I think.

After I'm done with the relatively-simple Devalo and Isolda, I think I'm going to take another crack at the gryphon. He's arguably one of my most complicated characters to date, so I've been taking a break while I've been working back up to tackling that task.

 I'm trying to pick myself back up for 2023, after being a mess for who knows how long now. For once I'm kind of optimistic! Here's to hoping said optimism survives the harsh winter!