Mamabito: Memories of Arcadia BEHIND THE SCENES (Patreon)

Hello again, Patreon! Work on my current comic project, Mamabito: Memories of Arcadia, is continuing at a swift pace! And you might have noticed that it's going much swifter than previous projects!! Well, there are several reasons for that! And I'm here to show and tell why!

First and foremost, I've got a hot fire going under my rear end, with the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons being a mere sixteen days away as of me typing this post. My original goal was to have this comic completed in time for the release of the game. I'm still going to move as quickly as possible in order to strike this iron while it's still scorching hot, as I continue to earn and grow my audience!

Secondly, this comic is 100% safe-for-work, which means I can do some kind of work on it at literally any free point in my day. And I mean any point! You might have recognized a couple of drawings from the very first page of this comic...

The sketches were shared on my Twitter, all the way back in... November! Which means work on this project officially started almost exactly four months ago! And, as you can see, these panels were drawn traditionally, with pencil and paper, and they were drawn during free time I found at work. And they're not the only ones...

Most of what's been drawn so far has been done on paper!! Entire pages worth, in some cases! Because the content is SFW, I can sketch these panels during downtime while I'm on the clock at work-- without fear of having to hide them from customers and coworkers-- then bring them home to scan later. And once that's been done...

We can clean them up lickety-split!! Wait, how fast is "lickety-split", anyway? Whatever, you get the idea!!

I also realized a while back that Animal Crossing has a lot of nature throughout: not just animal neighbors, but trees and sky and grass and all kinds of background stuff that would have to be drawn over and over again... Unless it doesn't have to be! So I came up with a solution!

Voila! An assets page! Trees, pines, grass, and even the sky itself have been taken into account! I'll be able to utilize this tool now to help shape the world of Arcadia around our little villager, by literally shaping these objects around and behind her throughout the story!

I'm especially pleased with how I've chosen to handle the trees in particular! See those weird shapes immediately to the right of both trees? Those are their texture! It may not look like much now, but a little resizing, some copy+pasting, and through careful use of the magic of clipping groups...

I can make several distinct-looking trees, one after the other! This will shave hours of time off of production, while still making the entire comic look presentable!

On that note, I should mention, a script has been written for this project... But I'm not so keen on sharing that just yet!! Better to let the feeling I hope to evoke land in comic form, than to give it all away in script format!

I'm feeling very confident about this project, and I'm eager to see it through to the end! It shouldn't be much longer before we see Page Two completed! And, as promised, you, my patrons, will be the first to see it!

Hope this sheds some light onto how this project is coming together! Please let me know what you think, and thank you again for your continued support!