Maijin-kakarroto

So! I set up the premium gallery, made the price $2 for access. I threw down 9 pictures from the archives. Experimental stuff from way back when I was just getting the hang of the new tech I had purchased. If you want to see how far I have come, throw down a couple dollars and have a look, especially considering that it's probably going to disappear again very soon. Not my fault but the Core membership is going to expire.

If you see anything worth a modern revamp then give me a shout and I'll get to work on it!

Support your boi and we can have a little bit more of an interactive experience.

Cheers!

Over the years I have had many favourites and watches from people of all sorts of artistic abilities and I love each and every one of those.

When I go to investigate what type of art they do I see a few of you wonderful people that are apparently just starting out and are brave enough to share your art with the world.

A lot of the time I see people using physical equipment like pens and pencils, just like when I started. It's great for honing your skills and experiencing the tactile sensation of drawing. The drawbacks however, tend to be that when you make mistakes you have to use erasers that if you catch your paper at the wrong angle can smudge your art or even tear the paper!

My suggestion to all of you is to acquire a cheap graphics tablet. And when I say this I'm not talking triple figures like I know some of these advanced ones to be, but something real cheap. I think over a decade ago when I got my cheap graphics tablet it didn't cost me any more than £30. I was using it with an already outdated computer with a free, resource sparing image editor.

I'm guessing the people who are just starting out and using pens and pencils are quite young so being able to hustle up £30 or your local currency's equivalent shouldn't be too much of a stretch. I mean, you're uploading stuff to the internet right? So that's already one barrier overcome.

Alternatively, if you really are out here in abject poverty, I started out digitally by scanning in my black-lined drawings and editing them in a free image editing program with the MOUSE! Nowadays though you don't need a scanner, your phone camera has hundreds of times the resolution of my old scanner so using that is a more than viable option.

I say this because I see some real potential out there. I want to type this on profiles but I fear I may come across as being rude. I want to see my fellow up and coming artists thrive and evolve and really have their artwork POP on my digital screens because I fear something is lost when we are just seeing photos of your physical media.

Well, that's it. Go out there and create some masterpieces.

About 3 weeks ago, I decided to stop running from something that I've been running from for a long time. My fear was that I would be tested and fail, like I had done up until this point. My artistic journey from when I could first pick up a pencil until now has levelled up leaps and bounds and I surprised myself with what I have picked up over the years.

I did sometimes think that since the late 90s and early 2000's I had been pretty consistently drawing Dragonball Z characters. At this point, two decades later, still drawing those pictures I had wondered if I stagnated.

I wasn't looking at the bigger picture and not giving myself enough credit. I had been unconsciously studying anatomy and poses the whole time. Then when I took up a different way of colouring my pictures, the excuses I made were that people were using brushes to get these brilliant finishes; I would never be able to accomplish this with the freeware programs I was using so why try?

Still wanting to further my skills I looked to online tutorials, free ones I might add. Artists spread the love and the techniques (they are easy to find, I just typed in what I wanted to study and got the answers that I needed, from many different sources.) and I was shown the light.

The tutorials that got to the point were my favourite and it was from those that I got the best information from.

It turns out that I had all the skills required to get the result I wanted. I just didn't have the REASON or JUSTIFICATION as to why the techniques work. Once I had those, everything clicked for me and it unlocked the gates that I was cowering behind in fear. My first step through these gates, I stumbled. I quickly picked myself back up and then I didn't gingerly tip toe through them, I kicked them down. Since then I have been on a tear.

I will now show you the fruits of my labour and what I've been hiding from all these years.

Stay tuned.

So. I've been thinking about how to further monetize my art and I realize that I am, quite rightly, avoiding furthering the reach of my digital illustrations and attempts at digital paintings on particular platforms (I'm lookin' at you TikTok) but I have fully embraced the DeviantArt community as it stands, to the point where I will get so many favourites I cannot keep up with the engagements that my pictures receive, even moreso now I am in dedicated full time employment. I'll fire off an upload and disappear for a while and when I return, because I don't quiet understand the social dynamics of online replies, if I leave it for like a week because work has been whooping my ass, is it too late to reply? Is it like the 'Gram where if you like an image from waaaaay back people will think you're weird even though the pics are left there to be perused at your leisure? I just don't get it.

I was thinking about a Patreon or something of the like where I can put up exclusive images, bring in pictures earlier than I'd post on here, Twitter and Instagram. Maybe some lineart as that is actually my bread and butter. I was even thinking of bringing back my ad-libbed, freestyled comics that I would make when I was much younger that just have an ongoing narrative of nonsense.

I also got myself some new tech that allows me to draw while I'm at work (dont tell the bossman/bosslady) which would be exclusive to the Patreon.

When I upgrade my tech further, I could do some streams of my process, maybe take some requests in real time and just in general chop it up with the squad.

This is all based on the fandom though because (my) art is only as valuable as you, the consumer of said art, deems it. I've only got a tiny handful of people across the social media platforms that give enough of a damn to come through and show some love to the artwork (you know who you are, big up yourself) so I don't even know how well it would translate over to a paid platform.

It's just an idea for now anyway. I guess it will progress further as I keep upgrading my tech.

Much love for reading this.

M_K out.

It's 2021 and it's looking to be about as bad as last year was. It is what it is. I have such a backlog of work from 2020 I have yet to share with all of you so there will be a combination of old and new work, as usual, when I post up some pieces. Let's see if we can salvage some positivity in this new year because admittedly, it's been a shaky start and we're only a week in. Good luck out there and stay safe.