Galactic-Rainbow

At last! I have finally made a personal website. And not just on a practice module, but for real.

https://childrenofastra-comic.com/home-page/

It was something I had considered for the past decade, but I never had a good reason to take the plunge to do so until now. I want a space to show potential agents and publishers the first 112 pages of Children of Astra so they can get a better idea of what the story will look like, as well as show that I have the work ethic to finish the rest.

In case you’re curious, I went with Bluehost for hosting, Wordpress for site design, and the Divi module to ease the learning curve. (I swear, every time I try to make a website, the entire process changes. Though I suppose that’s expected if I only try once every 5 years or so.) Sadly, during said learning curve, I accidentally threw away the home page, and even after I restored it from the trash, the link was permanently messed up. So make sure you put /home-page/ after the main url, as without it, you’ll be met with a “No Results Found” Divi page.

Like I mentioned before, if I don’t find any success with securing an agent or publisher, I’ll continue on with the comic anyway and maybe start cross-posting the pages here on dA. Until then, feel free to head to my website and take a look, if you’re interested!

(Oh, and any and all comments regarding my website or the pages within can be posted here on this journal. I'd like said site to maintain a professional appearance.)

This has been quite the productive year, as I have officially finished 122 pages out of 348 for Children of Astra! I also updated the layouts for the remaining ones to reflect the revisions and edits I've made since then.

Before I get too ahead of myself, however, I'll stop here and start looking around to see if any agents or publishers would be interested in this project. Not only is it one of the most solid original stories I've ever written, but because I intentionally structured the plot like a typical kid's movie (except for one part), I feel like it'll have the most widespread appeal. Honestly, just having even a single person I can talk the plot over with who can spot plot holes and things that don't work makes a huge difference.

Of course, if this endeavor doesn't pan out, I'm going to finish the story and self publish it anyway, but I at least want to make an honest attempt first.

To that end, I think I'll finally start making that personal website I keep talking about to serve as an official portfolio of sorts. Once I finish it, I'll make another journal entry linking everyone to it so you all can follow me there. Better yet, I'll post the entire first act of Children of Astra (Pages 1-112) on it too, so you all will be able to read what I've been working on! With luck, it should convince people that if I can finish all those pages over the past year, then I should be able to make it to 348 eventually, no issues. Especially since a lot of the hardest background and crowd scenes are now out of the way.

So that's my current plan for 2024! Wish me luck! Even though I ditched Intergalactic Fusion, I'm determined to at least get this single book completed, one way or another.

Hi, everyone!

So the good news is that I'm now in a position where I have more free time compared to when I was working full time! I've been working on Children of Astra (after having revised the scripts three times) and am now up to Page 20...out of 350, so this will take a while.

Like I mentioned in the description of the title page, however, I won't actually post any pages of it on this site unless I fail to get it picked up by any publisher. (Highly likely, but I won't know for sure if I don't try.)

And even then, it's far more likely that in the future, I'll create my own website where I can showcase my art. I know I've been on dA for a while, but the site has changed so much, and that a lot of the painstaking formatting on a lot of my content got eviscerated ever since this Eclipse update. As a result, my motivation for posting a lot of content here went way down, so I figure it would make more sense if I finally got off my butt and made my own website for once. (I'd been putting it off all this time because...well, web hosting fees, and I'm a cheapskate.)

The point is, even if I'm technically no longer in Hiatus x Hiatus, I still might as well be. As a result, the only art I'll actually post here for the foreseeable future are side things that I feel like drawing whenever I need a break from my main story. This can include stuff like Pokémon Scarlet spoilers, Invader Zim related art, fanart for any other games/shows I like...even concept art for original properties if I want.

I'll certainly create another journal when I make progress on any one of those fronts! Whether I get published (or not) or make a website. Especially the website, since I'd love for you all to be able to follow me there to see more of my art.

It was probably pretty obvious by my complete radio silence here, but...I don't have the motivation to post anything on this site right now

As far as IGF is concerned, I'll still likely keep going with the story (mostly because I'm already 2.3 books in, and everyone I've talked to says that I might as well keep going at this point), especially since I've managed to shorten the story to 6 books. Y'know, it's just that Book 6 will have four chapters instead of the usual three. However, due to the slow pace I can create pages and the complete lack of motivation I have to post anything else on this site, I'll probably wait until I finish all of Chapter 8 to post anything. Or even all of Book 3, for that matter. Hence the obvious "hiatus."

If I ever do get out of this hiatus, it'll probably be sometime after September 2022, since I do have plans to move out and everything.

That being said, I can still only call this a Kinda Sorta Hiatus because I'm also working on a really long fanfiction on the side right now, and I might post some Out of Context art for it here and there. (Alternatively, I'll either keep it all in Stash or post it to Scraps, depending on just how Out of Context the content really is.) I mean, I could cross post the actual fanfiction itself here, but in my experience, it's...well, I have even less motivation for that.

On one hand, I do miss the days when I'd be able to post art here very frequently, but on the other hand, it's a lot more relaxing now. Best of all, at this rate, I won't even need a Kickstarter or Patreon or anything to finish my comic.

Now I sleep, zzzzz

So a few months ago, I was invited to join a project with several other people who used to participate in the PMD-Explorers, which was a dA group that was created 10 years ago, but no longer exists. And I accepted! I created two pieces for the collab, which ended up becoming part of the video below:

I'll also be posting my individual pieces on dA, where I'll be reflecting back on my memories with the two teams involved.

I'll be honest; at first, I was a bit worried. I'm sure I'm not the only person who became aware of the seedy stuff that was going on behind the scenes regarding this particular dA group after it was closed down. In fact, it was worse; I was (more or less) completely aware of it even after I joined, and the only reasons I stayed was because 1) I thought everyone was okay with it, so I had to pretend like nothing was wrong, and 2) I had made too many new friends to quit.

Beyond that, since the group had its members primarily draw Pokémon comics, this meant I had developed a lot of bad habits in my art, from being intentionally lazy with drawing backgrounds to not practicing drawing people at all. I figured since it's not an Original Project, I didn't have to bother putting in a lot of effort since I'm not supposed to make money off of this, and hey, once I finally figure out what kind of Original Project I want to draw, I'll get serious then. But this meant that once I finally came up with the idea of Intergalactic Fusion and started drawing it, I had an extremely large learning curve ahead of me, bigger than I ever expected. I'm sure longtime viewers of mine are aware of how much the first book changed when I decided to go back and improve the drawings, and the worst part is that I'll probably end up doing that all over *again* if I happen to have the energy after I reach the end.

Honestly, the best things that came out of this group were 1) my ability to write characters in general improved considerably, and 2) making all of the new friends.

...Also a longtime boyfriend, but shh, you didn't hear it from me--

ANYWAY, what I'm saying is, there were plenty of reasons why I wanted to have this chapter of my left kept shut. I am glad I ended up accepting the offer, though, because everyone here was extremely supportive and welcoming, embodying the best aspects of the group that I remembered fondly. It was great to be able to draw Team Pecha as well as Rallen and Jody one more time, and more importantly, it was great seeing how much everyone else's art styles have changed and improve after all this time.

FYI: Most of these artists have moved to other sites like Twitter or Tumblr, and unfortunately, I have very strong personal reasons against doing the same myself. (I've already deleted both of my accounts on those sites, for one.) I do have an Instagram account, but the square format outright prevents me from uploading comic pages there, so I haven't touched it in...years, oops. I'm just glad that someone checked dA since I'm still here. ...Mostly because I already have 2.3 entire books' worth of IGF pages here and it'd just be too much work for me with my busy life to try and move everything to a new site.