GuildmasterPhill

If you are on discord and are a fan of the comic series, please join the new Adventurers' Guild discord! Here's the link.

See you there!

(This journal is a copy of something I documented on a discord server.)

Going through a bit of an unusual art tangent, and I figured I'd chronicle the development process which will lead up to the end result, when that happens.

Day ???:

While browsing twitter, saw an account of a 3D artist. Looked cool, has cute character designs, decided to follow. Some time later, I noticed that one of his/her designs that I quite liked was available on a store for purchase! This was not readily apparent because english was not this person's native language. It's a cute cat girl figurine!

Anyway, checked out the site, and there are several designs or style for said figure available. But, like some asian lines of figurines do, it's like a lottery: buy a box, you don't get to pick the design. surprise! it's one you don't quite like--so buy some more.

There were only a few 'single choice purchase' options available, and not any of the styles I liked. I wasn't going to shill out all the money needed for a full set like I did with fire emblem 4 figurines--didn't want that many kawaii neko girls anyway.

So, I decided to test my luck with 3 of 'em, accept what I get, and justify it to the kids as the 3 little kittens.

Order placed.

Day ???+3

My order of 3 little kittens arrives surprising fast!

And here they are:

the styles the randomness choosing process chose for me were... not quite to my tastes. the calico one is cute, but the other two basically seem like almost a duplicate of eachother. wasn't too enthusiastic about monochrome, either.

But there was no way I was going to return one and pay to try again or anything like that. I didn't want this to turn into a big ol consumer's quest. I was happy to just accept what I'd gotten, and get on with my life.

But then, late one night.... there came into me... a thought...

"I'm an artist. I can just paint them any color I want."

And, much like many ideas I have about my art or my writing, I could not shake this idea. But what design to go with? The orange tabby one I wanted but didn't get? No no no, that's aiming too low. If I'm going to bother to customize this thing myself, I'm going to do a unique design that I could be proud of. And who better to model this design on than my own cat-girl character and member of the Adventurers' Guild: Myra Lazuli.

But how do I get around the fact the Myra usually does not wear clothes, and these figures all have little dresses? Easy. Episode 9 design.

Now this idea would NEVER leave my mind until I saw it through to the end.

Day 1:

Did research online about painting figurines, something which I've never tried before. Looks like you just need acrylic paint, primer, very fine sandpaper, and very very small brushes. and patience.

Day 2:

Went to Texas Art Supply to purchase the needed materials, since I had none of them, as I'd never tried this medium before. T'was only after I'd finished the transaction that I remembered that I had a texasartsupply gift card on me that I'd been saving for since... well since before lockdowns happened. Looks like that card will have to wait even longer...

While I was there, I also picked up a bag of 3 blank men figures, meant for like a town diorama or something. Didn't want to totally botch the cat girl with un-practiced technique.

By the way, this is the one I chose to re-paint:

Day 3:

Got the chance to bust out the acrylic paints and try painting the mens. Don't want this project disturbed, not much of a good space for it in my work room, so the only choice is the garage. luckily, it's not blistering hot right not. only slightly hot. To test the painting technique I read about, I decided to do a bit of a science experiment. Here's the set-up:

One of the men I only painted with primer. an other I only sanded down. the third I both sanded and primed. Let's see the effects of all these steps.

It took a while, but I did finish painting all 3 in that one night. Let's look at the results.

First up, we're got Mr. Wright. He was primed initially, but not sanded. like the rookie lawyer that he is, he thought that a nice shiny coat was the answer to all his problems. Although that extra bit of prep ahead of time probably helped, some of the finer details get lost in the mix.

Next we have Mr. Hyde. He never bothered with getting shined up and primed, all his hard work and experience comes straight from the streets. Out there you get exposed to the roughest conditions of sandpaper hitting you all over. But ironically, when things got rough for this detective, the smoother he got. His paint went on very nicely.

Last, we have Mr. Dad. He's been through rough times in the past, but he also prepared for the worst. He tries his best and did not skip a step of the process along the way, no matter what other people try to tell you about men and ikea instructions. He's a good example of a man, and anyone that calls him "dad" sees him as a good example and role model, aiming to be more like him, or to impress him. Good thing then that "Dad" is his literal name, and everyone must call him that.

Day 4:

Time for cat girl to begin her transformation.

Based on the experimentation with the mens, I felt the just sanding is the way to go. but on the other hand, they all started as blank white... such is not the case with catgirl. She is much bigger than the mens, and has far more creases and tricky spots. sanding took way longer than the practice rounds. managed to get all over, but she might need more. getting late tonight, though.

Had to invent a sand paper pencil backscratcher to get to all those hard-to-reach spots.

Day 5:

Just more sanding, sanding sanding. So much sanding. I know I am slow as an artist, but I know also that I am patient as an artist. But this is too much! sanding... sanding... it never ends! Sanding is all I do now. When I close my eyes, I see her face. but the face fades, gradually, as if being sanded, sanded away... and the I wake up and I'm still in my garage, and I'm still sanding. Was it a dream? Or was it just the past hours being catalogued in my mind as "just more sanding"...? I don't know anymore. is there a difference? Had I not chosen to start this journal, would I be able to measure the passing of time at all anymore? sanding... sanding... Perhaps I should have bought a sander...

Day 6:

Consorted with some acquaintances that are more familiar with painting things that I am. Expressed my concerns about the fact that Mr. Wright's and Mr. Dad's shirt don't look that evenly painted, and they were the primed ones. They pretty much dismissed the idea of thinning stuff with water, and instead we thought that maybe spray-on primer might be a better way to go. I now have to go out and purchase such a spraycan, instead of starting priming like I had planned on doing today. ...I guess that means for today, I can do mooooooooooore sanding.

Day 12:

No entry in a while because nothing has happened for a while. Just more sanding whenever I got the chance, which came few and far between. Maybe I should have started with a lower grit number sand paper. Would that have helped? Maybe I should have used a rock tumbler. I did go to a hardware store to look into spray-on primer, but in my asking of someone if a certain can was water or oil based, it came round in conversation that he was strongly against using spray-primer with acrylic paint at all. he said it would result is streaky strokes, not adhering very well, and other stuff that to me sounded like an apt descriptions of the problems with Mr. Wright and Mr. Dad. So with my scientific test results in mind, I ditched the idea of using a primer.

It's not every day that a store employee is so helpful as to steer you away from making a purchase. Perhaps a positive online review is for once in order...

I can stand to sand no longer. Began mixing and applying Myra-colored paint layers.

Forgot to take a picture of how far I got n sanding the original paint job down, but I think that's just as well because she looked pretty creepy in that state. Especially the eyes, which were one of the parts that I could not get to fade away entirely.

Painting progress ^

Day 13: She's done.

As you can tell from the more high-res pictures, a bit of a rough texture, and there are certainly imperfections in paintbrush accuracy. BUT I am very satisfied with the end result. From how long the sanding took, I was afraid that this was going to turn into another one of these never-ending projects that I have going on in my life... but the painting stage, although requiring patience, put me into a determined push-forward mind set, and eventually breezed past.

No photo shot from behind because in case you couldn't tell this figurine has a rather hard-to-miss up-skirt shot which I don't feel like showing off. I hope you enjoyed going through this art journey with me, and I might journal more mini-projects in the future like this.

It's very easy for me to fall into complaining about how I don't have as many viewers, readers, subs, patrons, etc. as I'd like… especially when I compare my works to those of others. But it's times like that I need to take a step back, view the scope of what I'm doing, and be grateful for what I have. Let's look at the facts:

Fact1: The script of Adventurers' Guild is all written; the story is done. It is in total 6 seasons long. Every comic page produced and uploaded so far: the 3.5 years of uploading on my main site--all 337 pages uploaded on webtoons, are all a part of ONE season. None of you have even seen anything of the second season yet, and there are SIX seasons in total. This whole project will probably take over 30 years to complete at my current production rate.

Fact2: Adventurers' Guild has a total of 80 episodes. I'm in the midst (as of writing this post) of uploading episode 12 to the main website. While each season has about the same number of episodes (around 12 to 14), each individual episode gets longer as the script goes on Season 1 had a few episodes that were around 20 pages. While I don't have exact numbers yet, that's totally unheard of in later seasons.

Fact3: I'm taking on the production of this comic all alone. The writing, the art… It's a one-man-job on the surface, but in reality I'm not alone. I'm supported by an amazing wife who's not only a fan but also takes care of many other aspects of life so that I can keep working on my comic. Many others would probably try to direct my effort into something that helps to pay the bills a bit more, but she understands & supports my endeavors. I also have friends old and new that are truly enthusiastic to see how this comic plays out.

Fact4: My main comic site averages about 22 visitors per day, with anywhere from half to ⅔ of them being first-time visitors. On webtoons I have 124 subscribers and 22,198 pageviews. I have 3 patreon subscribers, and make $24 monthly there.

Fact5: I'm fully committed to the completion of Adventurers' Guild. It's my life's work. It's my dream. As a reminder of this commitment (& a self-reward for completing season 1,) I got the fleur-du-lis-n-sword symbol of Adventurers' Guild tattooed on my arm. That's how much this means to me.

Fact6: Of the 3.5 years of my website, the only upload days I've missed have been deliberate. Consistency means constant progress, no matter how slow.

Finally, this commitment of mine becomes so much easier to burden if I know that people are viewing the results of my labor and honestly enjoying it. If you haven't checked out Adventurers' Guild yet, I invite and strongly encourage you to do so, and to invite your friends to check it out too! God bless.

https://adventurersguildcomic.com/

I would say that it's the first and hopefully not last Adventurers' Guild fan art contest, but long-time devaint art fans here might know that it's not the first, actually. But it IS the first with prizes like THIS! Check out all the details in the press release below:

I want to do a firm criticism about something very daft and stupid and not befitting any of my more professional blogs, so I figure deviantart is just the place for that!

So let's get to it. Let's talk about... the most recent Minecraft update.

Specifically, let's talk about the bizarre choice to include these things called axolotls. Now, seeing as my kids and I watch a lot of nature documentaries as part of the nightly go-to-bed rigamaroll, I knew what this animal was. For most people, however, I do not believe that is the case. I think it's popular in specific niches, but hey, they somehow decide to go with that for the update.

Yes, they go with an extremely rare and exotic salamander type thing that few people ever see in the wild. Forget including much more common animals, like a lizard. or a seagull. or a bear. (not polar or panda, rather rare types of bears. just a plain ol bear, yo) or a frog! No, it has to be an extremely niche and unique species.

The point is, it was a bad decision in my opinion. There are lot of other things that should have been higher up the queue in add-to-update priority.

But they just had to go and make it more unique and disgustingly adorable in all its amazing and unique quirks, uwu. It can become you personal companion and fight bad guys with you! This makes sense for a tamed dog, or a hypothetical tamed falcon animal, (that would have been a better choice to add.) But this is just a stupid cave lizard, everyone; it knows not the concept of loyalty towards humans. But forget about that... if it hits its head too hard when attacking, it gets stunned, awwww.... it's pichu levels of adorable clumsiness. And then, you can just return it to its pokeball. I mean, water bucket.

So it seems to me that mojang's not so much adding aminals to Minecraft, they're adding pokemon companion-like creatures. This was probably foreshadowed in the addition of the over-the-top-adorable fox and all its abilities, like holding and attacking with swords and making cute little noises when it sleeps. and sleeping.

Did I mention that the axolotls make cute lil squeaks? I firmly doubt that happens in IRL. Disgusting.

Oh, and it has pokemon-shiny-style rare variations just to make eveyone get hyper obsessed for no reason and shot poggers in the chat. Yes, everyone simply must grind and grind to breed the rare blue one which has like the same chances of dropping as a sealed J-sword or something. (I regret saying "grind to breed")

The axolotl is truly the Mary Sue of Minecraft creatures. What ever happened to new animals that seem to actually reflect the roles that they fill in nature... that being very little? Those types of creatures are easier to program by far.

Even the other new creatures, the goats, they felt the need to give a rare variant in the screaming variety. And the magic new glowing squid does just fine at doing nothing and being useless! How backwards is that? Keep Minecraft simple!

If you ever invite me to play on your server, make sure to hide your axololtl farm. I cannot stand these things.