[Public] Monthly Round-Up, March! (Patreon)

Hi everyone! First, you will notice that this post is public. I wanted to let everyone know that I will no longer be doing public monthly posts on Patreon. If you were enjoying that, you can get those exact same free monthly updates at Ko-Fi , or on my blog with RSS! You can also get more consolidated quarterly updates on my newsletter, and that one will be going out soon :0

Why tho

• Most importantly: I thought there was a bit too much overlap between the public monthly and this round-up, and so I didn't think it added anything for my active Patrons. I want to make sure I'm not wasting your time :)
• Second: I don't think there are actually too many non-pledging followers here? 
• Lastly: I'll be real, posting everywhere is exhausting and I'm trying to cut wherever I can right now lol

If you're following, you'll still get my finished pages when they release public (usually 30d after they go live for Patrons). If you join the Quality Tester tier ($2) you'll get this detailed monthly round-up + wallpaper, special events, and 2x exclusive updates with page previews and art! Thanks so much for following my work!!

Onto the normal Round-Up...

(I've been making some random signal stickers for fun hehe)

It's April! The trees are bloomin' 🌸! Happy Nowruz! Ramadan Mubarak! Happy Passover! Happy Easter!! I got a bit sick for a week or two (overwhelmed with life stress) but I rested and now I'm feeling better :) I just have to make sure I don't get too excited and grind myself out again. 

"Jam does their dang taxes" month was a resounding success*, so this month is Patron Sketch Requests! Watch for that soon :)

* as in, I did my taxes

Quality Testers

I'm working on a new Solarpunk comic and this month I shared some of that research, as well as a pencilled page of my next "chill zine". I also did a DIY art degree update with many many paintings of trees. 

Lab Techs

I dove a bit deeper into the setting of my Solarpunk comic, and also dove a bit deeper on the topic of brushes.

Collaborators

This month I went deep behind the scenes - what does it take to build a website?

The Tradewaiters

This month we discussed Descending Stories, a fascinating story about a dying Japanese art form that I got low-key obsessed with after finding it randomly in the library and forced everyone to read. 

Socialzzz

• Tumblr: behind the scenes with the soon-launching Career Zine!
• Mastodon: would you smooch a T-Rex?

Hey, Neat(?) in an Overwhelming Way

Machine Generated whatever is continuing to go wild right now and I have so much to say about it and nowhere to say it. The releases are coming so fast and furious that it's a lot to keep up with. I've been enjoying these FutureTools videos just as a way to keep up with what's now released and possible. 

For art probably the biggest news is Adobe Firefly which got a pretty bad knee-jerk reaction from the community (understandably) but it's trained 100% on licensed commercial stock only and that's a big deal.

The biggest sleeper news for art is how quickly render tools and chat-GPT is getting integrated into blender. For comics, being able to throw some blocks in perspective and tell an AI to make it vaguely look like a mideavel town would be a game-changer for speeding up backgrounds. I tested disco diffusion on this EXACT SAME TASK last year (June 2022!!) and it couldn't do it. Now with 3D context it does it easily.

I'll reiterate... regardless of how you feel about this please pay attention, big changes are going to come fast and hard. Amy Webb's annual Tech Trends SXSW talk just released and if you just want a bigger picture overview of this I highly recommend it.

Jam IRL

My rascals got adopted! They're going to a family with a ton of cat experience and adoration and I know that they'll be loved to bits, I'm so pleased~ I'll miss these two!!

Ok everyone that's all for now. Stay safe out there, team!