Finally the year is over!

2023 has been a sort of middle ground year for me. Some parts were good, some parts were not so good. There wasn’t anything drastically bad, but the art has slowed down by quite a lot. I have kept promising to do certain projects and then end up simply not doing them because of whatever reason at the time. The two biggest problems I run into are that I still get heavily fatigued randomly, and sometimes I just simply don’t want to work on something.

As I write this out, I currently have one commission left in my list to complete and it will be finished before the year is out, but after that, I’m thinking of taking a long break away from commission / big project work. I don’t want to make anyone feel disappointed from that, but there it is. I will most likely continue doing little sketches here and there and whatever I feel like in the moment, but planning big project type stuff is currently not in my mind.

I’ve also been having a harder time with posting online these days for whatever reason. I feel like it’s become a huge pain in the butt to do, what with all the new websites cropping up, learning their rules and then them changing their rules, dealing with their algorithms, the way you even upload and post onto the damn site itself. It’s a hassle. An app called Postybirb alleviates some of that hassle, but still.

As far as my Patreon content goes, I’m not actually all too sure. At the very least, I will most likely continue to post sketches and such, but I’m not sure what will happen for the higher tiers, such as the KRA/PSD and Timelapse tiers. We’ll see I suppose!

This isn’t a very good update post, but oh well!

Happy New Year! Let’s hope 2024 is a good one this time.

https://blokfort.com/commission-details/

Commissions are open!

HOWEVER - only Rough Line-art will be available for base commissions.
Chibis, Items/Props and Character Sheets will still have Clean Line-art.

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https://blokfort.com/comic/featured-front-page-post/end-of-the-month-post-march-2023/
https://www.patreon.com/posts/80865964

I had no PSDs to post on Patreon this month.

I spent most of my time working on the EotP page (and being fatigued), and, I've also been using Krita, which uses their own file format.

Krita uses .kra files, naturally. This is something that's actually been spreading to other drawing programs, which is making me question the PSD format lately.

Clipstudio uses .clip files.
Art Studio Pro on the iPad - artstudio files
Procreate - proc files
Krita - kra files

You get the idea.

The problem with this, is that when I try to save any of these files into a PSD file, it ruins some of the functionality in the layers. Certain lighting layers break, fonts and vector layers stop functioning as they should and instead turn into a flat rasterized layer, in certain ways, clipping layers get out of order, certain grouping layers break. It's a mess.

As I'm writing this out, I think they best way for me to work with this is to just simply post the file I worked in. PSD files just simply don't seem viable anymore, due to the saturated field of art programs. I will make a point to mention what kind of file it is and what program is needed to read it however. Usually the programs I use are fairly cheap.

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Commission forms closed, thank you!

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https://blokfort.com/commission-details/ Commissions open!

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So I feel a little bad about this but I've lost my little note about who was potentially interested in commissions when I get that started up again.

So instead I'm just going to say that I'll be opening the commission forms up on the: 8th of January.

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I didn't have much to say for the past few months as I've honestly mostly been struggling with certain things in art that I felt like were not actually all that note-while to mention, so I didn't write anything at all. But, now I feel like I do!

I'm going to put efforts into doing comic work. I've wanted to do comics for a while, but never felt like I have to appropriate skills for them. Lately that feeling has changed, and I feel like the time is write to actually put more efforts into it. I have two general ideas about comic work which I have mentioned before, most likely multiple times by now. Frame-by-Frame Comics (FFC?) and Tradition Page Comics (TPC?). FFC is a picture a page, a sequential picture story telling comic, like the "Heat in the Laundromat" comic (NSFW!). A TPC is a pretty typical comic layout, like from webcomics or manga. At the moment, my idea is to work on comics in between commissions and other stuff. I made up the bracket way of commissioning to help organize myself and for it's first real 'use' I really like it. In between each bracket, I will work on 1 full set of an FFC, or a page of a TPC back and forth. So, it might look like this:
[Bracket 1] Commissions
FFC
[Bracket 2] Commissions
TPC
[Bracket 3] Commissions, and so on.

Though I think I may indulge in a short comic before I accept commissions again, heh. I will see how the next batch of commissioning goes as I don't want to overload myself, but I've been having thoughts of making a return of Weekly Vote stuff as well. We'll see.

As I mentioned at the start, I actually had a bit of a struggle with the last few months of art. I've been distracted, and frankly unwilling to do art in general. I think I've narrowed down why that is, and my solution to it is to completely drop the "complex shading" category (again). I honestly feel happier with "simple shading" and I believe there are some parts of it I can improve in general with it, but because I classify and separate what "simple" or "complex" shading is, I stop myself from doing certain things. I think it would be easier on my mind if I merely just say "Shading," and do what I feel like is correct with the piece without those fake limitations.

Because of both the comic work and the shading issues, I want to try limiting what can actually be commissioned. The simplest solution I've come to is to say "no Medium or High level backgrounds," (Low is OK tho!)

See ya next year!

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Title.

Square-Up is not as bad as Paypal at least, since they automatically tranfer whatever money is in your account to your bank account at the time if you get restricted, but this is still a pretty sad blow. As per usual, there's no exact 'thing' that this company will point to as say "this is the reason why we banned you" but instead has the, againm, usual list of vague terms of service rules, and a metion of "high risk" merchandise.

Unfortunately, furry art, and art in general these days, falls under "high risk" merchandise. "High risk" means that the service (Square-Up / Paypal) risk having to deal with cases that you might often see on sites like Artistsbeware. Cases like paying for like $1000 on something, and not getting the thing you paid for, or providing the product, but not getting paid for it.

If this keeps up, I might have to change how I conduct myself.

End of the Month Post - September 2022 - The Art of Blokfort

The start of the month was pretty good. I tried out my new stream/drawing schedule, but after only 2 days I dropped it, and now aim for much more relaxed times. September has been the month of "I'm tired." and while I did get an 'adequate' amount of work done, it could have been more. I had a lot of days where I struggled to even focus on anything, with my head in a sort of warm foggy daze. Odd to explain, but there it is.

Of the work completed this month, I've changed a few of my commission form terms / wording, such as saying, "Clean Lin-Art" instead of just "Line-art," because technically anything that has lines is a line-art piece. So, I'm now using Rough Line-Art and Clean Line-Art for the different line-art styles I can offer, since one is rough and the other is clean. I decided not to go with "Sketch" for the rough line-art terming, because what people determine to be a "sketch" varies incredibly wildly.

The other thing I've changed in my commissioning process is changing which commissions I will work on. I actually had to sit-down and think about it for a few hours and I'm pretty happy with this new system for myself. Ultimately, nothing changes for the commissioner! This system is all just for me, and it takes a load off of my mind.

Old Commissioning Format: People who have stated interest in getting a commission 'in the future' (While my commissions are currently Closed) would get put on a "call-back" list of sorts, and I generally accept all of them, while also still keeping commissions closed to everyone else.
What people would commission, in terms of "difficulty level" were kind of random, but usually on the Larger end. I use the terms Small, Medium, Large, Turbo and Titan to help quantify the commission for myself.
This system makes it hard to accept commissions from newer sources, and it's a little awkward to accept new commissions from people while I have the "Commissions Closed" banner posted.

New Commissioning Format: Bracket Commissioning! A Commission Bracket is sort of like a Slot, but instead of a fixed number of slots, it based on the Difficulty Level of the commission. I have assigned a value number to each Difficulty Level and I'm currently trying out a Bracket limit of 15, with three Brackets that can be filled.

• • Small - 1
  • Medium - 2
  • Large - 3
  • Turbo - 4
  • Titan - 6
  • [Bracket 1] [Bracket 2] [Bracket 3]

What this means is that a Bracket could look like this: [Large, Large, Large, Medium, Turbo]. This means that there are 5 commissions to do in that bracket. Bracket 1 commissions will get their invoices sent and worked on right away, whereas brackets 2 and 3 will have to wait a bit until the prior bracket is cleared. If all three brackets are filled, then I will close commissions entirely until all three brackets are completed. Asking / Accepting a commission is still by a first-come-first-served sort of way, since I've yet to actually be overloaded with commissions, heh.

I know, how wonderfully complicated.

A newer thought that occurs to me while writing this, is that if commissions fill up frequently enough for me to close them, then I may look into dropping bracket 3 entirely in favor of trying out YCH (Your Character Here) type commissions/auctions. I don't want to make YCH a main thing though.

I think I took on too many commissions, heh. That said, it wasn't unexpected. I took on a lot of commissions to sort of stress-test workload. I think overall I handled it pretty well. I'm decently happy with the outcome of each commission and, I can only assume, the commissioners were too. However, I still have an issue with speed. I had many days where I simply didn't work on anything at all. I had many days where I felt extremely tired or fatigued, or I had "foggy head" days; difficulty thinking / keeping focus on things. I know "comparison is the thief of joy" but I can't help but compare myself to other artists who seem to get pic after pic done on the daily. To me, these aren't just "throwaway" pics either.

It's kind of funny to talk about, but as it stands I currently do about 4-5 days, 4-6 hours for each day of "drawing time." I really need to bump these numbers up. On my streaming page at Blokfort - Piczel.tv I have shown in the offline image that I stream Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, 1pm-9pm. I have yet to meet either the daily schedule, or those hour times. I'm always seemingly picking 1 random day to just say "nah, I'm not drawing/streaming today." and I feel like it's really hurting my art output. I'm not really sure how to 'fix' that though.

I think for the month of August, I'd like to explore these things a bit more, so I'll be not accepting any commissions for the time being. I do have a waitlist/call-back list of people who have expressed interest and will get back to those people when the time comes.

Some things I'll be exploring are:

Scenic stuff, figuring out how to do backgrounds and not hate myself. Some things that come to mind at the moment are mountains, forests, brick walls, inside room design.
Look into 3D stuff like Blender for rooms(?) Grease pencil?
Figuring out how to bump up drawing times by either figuring out what's going on with me, or simply working through it.
Rework how certain parts of the Commission Details page looks, like adding examples, and redefining what "line-art" is. Again. Maybe change "sketches" to "rough."
Update some website buttons.
Try doing some clean/inked/smooth line-art again.