Daisy's Diner

It’s hard for me to keep track of who I keep in the loop, in terms of comic updates. Patrons and anyone on my Discord are regularly updated, followed by Twitter. Any other sites – including this one – tend to get lost in the shuffle. “I’ll post an update later”, except I’ll forget once it’s later.

So, what have I been up to since the last page was posted in August? Working.

Contract work had been sparse for much of the year, to the point that I’d grown acquainted with – and disdainful of – LinkedIn recruiters. So, when a job came along that I didn’t have to fight for, and was pretty much exactly what I’d been waiting for for a few years now, I jumped at the chance. It was only a 3-month gig, but it paid well, so surely I could shelve the comic for 3 months?

…Barely 2 months in, the contract was extended to 6 months. And now there’s talk of another potential 6-month job after that.

If this other contract does happen, I may need to find a realistic way to continue the comic, without burning myself out. One approach would be to cut the chapter short, but there are some ideas that I don’t want to cut. Another approach I’d considered before, is doing the rest in black & white. Re-using backgrounds could also be a huge time-saver.

All told, the joke in my mind is that Daisy’s long weekend away from the diner may easily take over a year to play out. The key thing is it will play out, it’ll just take a bit longer than I’d originally anticipated.

Recently Tumblr has been become unreliable, with many artists having their NSFW art and/or blogs deleted. Many artists are migrating to other sites, like Newgrounds and Pixiv, and while I have made a Newgrounds page, I figure this was also a good excuse to start getting more use out of my site!

First and foremost, I’m slowly moving all of my old art to my new gallery here. It’s a slow process, which might go faster if some files didn’t appear to be missing, or if Windows permissions weren’t such a pain when sharing hard drives between computers…

I’ve also added a Behind the Scenes section, for more in-depth posts about my characters and projects.

Finally, my recent hiatus – I’ve been busy with back-to-back contracts for most of the year, leaving little time for art or other personal projects. Over the past couple of months, I have been drawing a new comic chapter – one that at this point I’ve put off for more than a year – and while several pages are already drawn & assembled, unfortunately it may still be at least a couple of months before I can ink, color, and post them. Please be patient!

So I’d planned on taking a break from comics back in December, mainly because December is always too hectic.  Only instead of that, I ended up doing a 3-page comic.  And then after that was finished, I added another page to it.  So now almost two months after I’d originally planned on taking a break, I’m definitely taking a break!  Kinda, sort, maybe.

My plan for February – at the moment, anyway – is to work on my 3D Daisy model.  I’ll also still be drawing pinups and commissions for my patrons.

The comic’s finally been updated, and with only one more page to go, I just might be able to finish the chapter sometime this decade!  After this I’ve got a couple simpler ones planned, about 1-2 pages each.  For future chapters, I won’t start posting pages until the entire chapter is fully scripted and thumbnailed, to avoid the problems I had with the current chapter.  Of course, even then it’s dependent on my work schedule.

Today’s been a bit of a “head” day – I’ve spent most of the day thinking about how best to move forward an animation I’ve posted on my Patreon, Tumblr, and DeviantArt pages.  If you don’t follow me on those sites, I have two words for you – animated Daisy!  I won’t link to it here, because it’s not exactly work- or kid-safe.

I don’t know how long it might take for me to finish that Daisy animation, either rough or full color, but I do have an idea of what it would take to do so in 3D.  I’d estimated that it would take at least a month of full-time work for me to model and rig Daisy for this sort of motion.  But that’s not the model I currently have in the works – the current model will be waitress-only.  Nude/bikini Daisy would be a whole separate character, from a production standpoint, and since that model would be mostly for fan-service, it’d have to be a lower priority than my other characters.  Unless, of course, I knew for certain that producing and animating that version of her would draw in a massive amount of new patrons…  That’s a lot of work for a “maybe”, though.

One of my goals now is to have waitress Daisy modeled and textured by November – if not October – and her unicorn speech animated by Christmas.  We’ll see if my schedule actually allows me to pull that off.  I may continue to refine this 2D animation on the side, but it may be too much to hope to have it finished by Christmas as well.  That might be a hell of a gift, though!