What I've been up to is a good question seeing as I haven't posted in a few months. I thought to refocus my idea for this blog to be about updating myself to family and friends who live far away, whether that be in another county or another country entirely. So that's going to be my main reason for having a blog. Plus I thought it'd be fun I guess.
I've been sick lately, I presume due to my father being sick and I catching it so now I'm sick. It got me quite down in the dumps being sick for such a long time but oh well. In the meantime I've been listening to Junior Senior's Move Your Feet on repeat, which is a really fun song. I've been thinking of making a silly meme of Denmark's Junior Senior, Norway's Kings of Convenience, and Sweden's The Tough Alliance with a caption like "Which Scandinavian indie duo are you today?"
There's also a nice live video of Junior Senior performing the song. If I got the right video, there were a lot of comments saying how attractive Junior of Junior Senior is, with one comment saying he looks like a "romance anime protagonist from the 70s". But there was another comment replying to that saying "it would be a romance between the two vocalists". I thought that was funny.
Art-wise I've been doing a lot while I've been sick. I have been painting with gouache more, experimenting with it as I am more used to watercolors. I also have experimented with drawing the comics for my upcoming Hurray #3, my one woman comic anthology in my sketchbook. I also have drew more in oekaki boards, or messaging boards where you can draw on it inside the browser. For me, I like that sort of nostalgic, pixelated feel and the programs, at least the ones I use, tegaki.js as layers, so it's a bit more sophisticated than MS Paint.
One such oekaki board is paintbbs.sakura.ne.jp. I tried to host an art trade thread but my understanding of Japanese art trade culture vs American art trade culture is rather confused admittedly. From what I've learned, I believe that in Japanese online culture you post your character with the words "you can draw". I tried that, and got much art of my original character Peter Cooper from my comics. I felt kind of bad though since they did all this wondrous art for free and I didn't do much in return, but maybe the culture is different?
BTW if you are one of the artists who drew Peter for me but would like me to take it down from my website, feel free to let me know. I just like carrying art of my own characters to appreciate it, but I get it though.
Another such website for oekaki that I've been using is Pinksea. Pinksea use Bluesky to login, which kind of reminded me of how the new Tegaki (different than tegaki.js, the drawing program) used Twitter for people to login. Unlike Tegaki, Pinksea uses tegaki.js (I know, confusing lol). Also, Pinksea kind of leaves a blurry effect on my artwork compared to using tegaki.js in PaintBBS. I may investigate it further, and still keep using it.
Lastly, speaking of Hurray #3, I may release an online store to release my comics on, as well as maybe stickers and buttons and other zines. I'll see though. But look for that in the future.