Hello. I feel like writing a blog post to distract my brain, but I'm not sure WHAT to write about. Hang on.

OH! Here's how things are going with volume 1 of Slimepunk: by the end of August, I had 18 preorders altogether for the physical edition, which was enough to order a small print run of 40 copies. After receiving and approving the proof, those 40 copies came in at the beginning of this week, as well as the envelopes to ship them in! I'm excited about this! To have the whole thing in one book is so surreal and neat.

I gave two copies to the Bristol Public Library. It's officially in their system and will be available to check out in the kids section AND the teen section soon! How cool is that?!

You can still preorder a physical copy for yourself here, grab a PDF copy here, or just read the whole thing on the website!

This also reminded me that I needed to put Slimepunk on Goodreads, so I went ahead and did that too. If you've read along online or got the PDF when it released earlier this month, go rate and review it for me, please. And here's a reminder that there are other comics of mine on my Author page as well, if you're inclined to rate and review those.

(everything except BattleArc 2088 is free to read, y'know!)

I uh, haven't been working on much. Did some nude paintings that can be seen on my NSFW Instagram account, plus some more kaiju fanart because I don't have the capacity to do much else. Here's Gamera's first foe, Barugon:

Things have sort of come to a halt for the online figure drawing group. I was running out of poses and energy. It was never meant to go for as long as it did anyways! If you'd asked me back in April or May, I would've sworn that we'd be on the other side of this pandemic by now and that I'd be able to host figure drawing in my own home again! But nope, we're inept, we botched it, there's no way we'll be able to meet up again this year. It sucks and I hate it.

Figure drawing truly is the one thing I miss because of covid. It makes me sad and frustrated that I can't have friends over, cook for them, put together a playlist, come up with fun themes, and sit and draw, yelling whenever the timer goes off. I miss it more than anything else, and the online group was fun, but it was not even remotely an adequate replacement for that intimate socialization.

I've started doing some sketches from a reference website someone shared, which is getting me back into doodling nudes, so I've got that at least.

Speaking of nudes, I had a Facebook post go unexpectedly viral this week?! I occasionally do art inspiration posts on my personal page, where I drop a painting or illustration or something and talk about why I like it. It's just nice to do. Last week, I shared this nude pre-cast clay sculpture by Ramon Sierra (hopefully that link works), which I'd found in a Tumblr post a couple months back. It's just super cool to see such a gorgeous sculpture of a larger model, when I primarily, foolishly am so used to just seeing sculptures of fit, muscular, thinner models.

And it took off. As I type this, it's at 4000 reactions and 17000(!!) shares. How wild is that?! And, much to my surprise, it hasn't gotten a single hateful or fatphobic comment! I'm really glad it's made an impact for so many people, but what's weird to me is how ever since it started getting wildly shared this week, I've been getting dozens of friend requests per day from all over the world. I finally remembered to tag Sierra himself in the post the other day, and I hope more people see that, click through, and follow him. HE'S the one who deserves all the attention, not me.

I have accepted about 30-ish of all the friend requests I've been getting. My feed could use some more variety for sure. But for real, it's surprising and overwhelming.

So...that's all for this blog, I guess. Maybe once I get these copies of Slimepunk shipped out, I can really start working on volume 2. I've got other things to work on, but still little energy, and I've had people mentioning setting up shows or pointing me to places looking for artists to show their work, but...I don't really have anything planned for that sort of thing at all right now. I don't have that hustle in me.

And for now, with everything else going on, I hope that's okay. Take care.