Can’t believe one man (we’re talking about Mr. Aventurine, yes) just dragged me back to playing Honkai Star Rail and draw a bunch of fanart mini comics again. Since next month is my convention at Doujima Singapore, I honestly didn’t expect I’d churn out some non-event related art, but hey, the fangirling drives can take you to far places you didn’t expect, haha.
I think I’ve prepared almost everything I need for Doujima, for now mostly are waiting game – to wait for stocks to arrive, accepting pickup orders, and trying my best to promote my merch catalogs. There’s a bunch of anxious feelings since the timeline of printing is pretty tight, considering I’m also opening pickup merch for AFAID. I hope everything will work out all right in the end, wish me luck!
The first post I made is the anticipation for Aventurine’s banner! Man, mostly here I’m trying my best to figure out how to draw his hair, haha. The idea came on when I saw his status on our chat conversation ingame – ‘always open to pull for your game account’, knowing it’s also a gacha game and his godly luck, I definitely would like him pulling for my gacha luck!
I often got inspired best from ingame experiences and official content, so the other one is when I saw the official illustration for the ‘magazine interview’ where he’s looking fine and just waking up… haha, so yeah I combined those two ideas together of the MC keep bothering him for a pull and just took him away when he let his guard down.
For those who have been following me for awhile, you probably have seen that my favorite character in Genshin, the other Hoyoverse’s game, is Childe / Tartaglia. They both have no highlight in their eyes color, which sometimes I feel not used with, but it’s part of their charm, haha. Some of my friends straight on could tell I’d pick Aventurine as my bias since they saw me liking Childe. Am I that predictable, huh? :’D
The next comic is based on my experience of having a friend help out with my Honkai Star Rail account, which is quite messy since I barely pay attention to my relics and team building, hahaha.
This time I experimented to squeeze in the idea to just one page. Initially it was split to 4 panels (with a timeskip to me pulling Acheron instead of saving gems, and me with Aventurine in the ‘do it for him’ meme doing my quests) – but eventually I decided to fit it in one post.
I feel the tricky part with making comics for me is to decide how many panels are enough, and writing the dialog lines and setting the characters to deliver the plot and ‘punchline’ in the easiest way to be ‘funny’ and to understand. Are 3 panels to set up necessary or I can just draw one and fit the rest as side doodles and dialogs? And so on.
I feel I often end up thinking in too many conversations and panels, so I’m trying to learn to be more concise so I can have less things to draw and finish the ideas faster.
The latest comic is again, still related to Aventurine, hahaha, he’s just my muse at the moment. I tried to reuse some elements to reduce time drawing and limit the number of frames (initally again I thought of 2 more panels, but decided it’ll still be similar story even without those extra panels) – I often feel embarrassed having to do it since it felt like ‘cheating’, but I feel it’s useful to do that way to save time and as long as it can still get the message across clearly and it still looks good and not just slapped on together in a cheap way. I hope it’ll still look good and entertaining for others though.
There are just some characters that are truly like a drawing muse to me, that gives me ideas and makes me happy to see content of it and makes me root for them. To reflect back on the specific characters that made me feel that way have been: Hide (Tokyo Ghoul), Oikawa (Haikyuu), Seven (Mystic Messenger), Childe (Genshin), and now Aventurine (Honkai Star Rail). Is there a pattern? I feel yeah I am pretty predictable, but I’m not really sure to put it to words, haha. I first played HSR for Dan Heng though, I need to draw him more sometime.
It’s been awhile since I had that boost of ideas and drive to finish a series of mini comics. Back then notedly when I was starting Genshin, since there was a lot of fresh experiences and co-op shenanigans with friends. Life then gets busy and I couldn’t catch up with the quests and got to lack of ideas and time that is called to do other things, so I haven’t really got around to it.
I got anxious to draw more of these since it takes longer time than usual illustration, and I doubt myself if I’m even funny, or if my dialogs make sense, and so on. But honestly, I enjoy making comics and sharing stories with other people, I used to make some random comics at school of funny things that I saw and some OCs I made up, so the desire has been there for awhile. I’d love to make more comics again, especially original ones, but it may come pretty rare when an idea feels right. Usually I end up having these random ideas that just nag on me and I just feel I have to draw this silly idea! and there it goes, haha.
I’ve also recently been plagued with some thoughts if I’m doing things inefficiently, that I feel my accounts’ content got too mixed up with different kind of things I can’t choose to focus on (a mix of merch stuff, fanart, originals, streaming, commission, etc.) – honestly I have still yet to find the right answer. It does feel pretty disorganized, but I do enjoy all these different things. I don’t exactly have a plan yet besides trying to keep doing things that I can, which feels quite silly and inefficient, but I feel whenever I tried to be stricter on myself like scheduling things ahead, life throws curveballs at me that I just quite give up to plan too much hahaha.
Like for this blog, I mostly keep since I like writing out my thoughts and keeping some sort of documentations of my progress. If you do get interested to read this far, I thank you for your time and hope you’ll have a nice day. Maybe I’ll figure out things more as I go, maybe not, I’ll try to keep at least moving forward one step at a time with what I can, as long as I don’t stay still or quit, I think someday it’ll lead somewhere in a clearer way. Hope to see you again next post update!
