Here's to another year, and here's hoping it isn't a complete clusterfuck like the last one! As we head into 2021, I've been thinking about what I want to do as far as my artwork is concerned and I've really only come up with two resolutions for myself:

1. DRAW MORE

Yeah, this has been a resolution of mine that comes up every year for the past 5 years and it ain't stopping now! Work has left me incredibly burnt-out lately due to mandatory overtime that has been carrying on over the past two months alongside the bosses taking their frustrations out on the few employees that are busting their collective asses on the job (resulting in them working less or outright not showing up; seriously, there's suppose to be 40+ people on the warehouse floor and right now we're down to about 13...). I use to doodle any ideas that came to mind during downtime, but I'm now hustling every single second to keep the warehouse running and doing other people's jobs to the point where that creative spark has been thoroughly drowned. I do intend to rekindle it however; I'm taking an extended New Year's weekend away, dusting off my resume, and brainstorming new ideas on what I want to draw. I picked up the digital tablet over 5 years ago because I was determined to draw exactly what I wanted instead of always leaving my ideas in the hands of somebody else, and I am determined to keep on trucking no matter what.

2. Start on "Red"

Oooh boy, does anybody remember that cover page I made for "Red" 2 years ago? Well, it wasn't dead on arrival; I had actually plotted out the initial comic pages, drawn the first 4, and was in the middle of drawing page 5 when I stopped to take a step back and really look them over... and my initial reaction was "this is garbage". Yeah the perspectives were alright, but the lines were clunky and chunky, the colors were so muted, and I just didn't feel a proper connection between them and the story I had in mind, so I scrapped the comic pages. Since then, I've been combing over the story again and again to further flesh minor and major events out, and I came to the realization that it might be easier for me to write "Red" instead of draw it.

I'm sure comics take off better than written stories here though, so I've come up with an idea that's a bit of a compromise between the two; I intend to write "Red" as a novel and include some illustrations for each chapter to help set the scenes/moods. I'd like to do proper fully-colored pictures, though I may lean more towards B/W or colored sketches depending on how I feel during each chapter. My intention is to at least reach the halfway point of the first "book" of the series; my stories tend to run a bit long and I have to actively reel it back to keep things from reaching Dragonball GT levels of convoluted (Seriously, my storyline for "Uncivil" could've actually given Dragonball a run for its money in terms of length and ridiculousness before I gave about 90% of it the axe), so the storyline for "Red" is currently solidified as a 3-book series.

As for what "Red" is all about, the story follows my platinum fox Michael Crowley and the work he does as a detective in the Alabastor District (essentially a town-sized red-light district). The detective does his best to keep the district safe (sometimes through questionable means) while indulging in his own deviant tastes as a slave owner. The setting is AR (alternate reality) and has a bit of a futuristic feel to it. It also makes use of the Auramancy system that I've been developing for over a decade now (I started to make a sort of overview of it HERE, though there have been some minor changes to it since then that will be covered in the story itself).

So... yeah, that's my plans for the new year. Let's see how hard they crash and burn this time around!