Directions & Pixels

Posted on by LittleFears

You all know by now I plan things well in advance of doing them. The current Black Sands series runs until October, where there’s a series of one-off daily stories. Then I have Inktober. After that, I don’t know.

I’m still adamant I’m not going to use the 1,000 or so tales I already had written. The extended singular story of Brass barely worked once. I do not want to try that again.

I’m also conscious of my paper usage. I’m currently working on a set of pixel-art characters to drop in alongside scanned ink characters. So I still get to use ink characters on photos, but I’m not drawing hundreds of the same character. It would give my work more consistency and variation as I’m able to bring in new elements. As I’d been using independent graphics, it would allow me to get some basic animations in the video. Even a side-scrolling perspective shift would be visually more appealing than a static pic.

So the series after Inktober will hopefully follow the pixel art, Etta, shown above, alongside a hand-drawn sea-devil. It’ll only be thirty stories long but will be good practice for mixing different styles.

Hey, another thing we’ve been working on this month. One of the strangely popular things I did was a course on Skillshare for turning hand-drawn doodles into digital graphics (linky: skl.sh/2G40lMs ). I wrote a series of follow up courses covering subjects like poster design and turning photos into logos. As with almost everything I create, I’ll upload them free for everyone for five days on release before setting them to Premium on Skillshare. If you sign up to them when they’re free, they’re free forever.

I figure the first (well, next) one I should publish is a beginners guide to GIMP. It’s a 40-minute long free class that’ll give you a tour of all the main tools in the free image editing program, GIMP. That one will be free to everyone forever. No premium subscription will ever be required for that course.

You can download GIMP for Windows, Mac and Linux here (link: gimp.org/ ) and the first course should land next week.

Content creator hat on.

Hey, subscribe, follow, mew quietly at me on social media and you’ll hear about each course as they come out and you’ll be able to nobble them all while they’re free.

Content creator hat off, cleans hands.

Man, why does it still feel dirty doing that? Eh, let’s get a lil dirtier.

kaiju kijune shark

If you love the Fears, the puns, the groans and tiny terrors and you have any spare change, there’s a whole bunch of ways to support me and keep the stories coming.

You can buy a tee on Threadless, for which I get $5 per sale. You can buy me a cuppa over on Ko-Fi. Want to support me monthly? Hit me up on Patreon for as little as $1 a month. I also have an Etsy store and a book series on Amazon.

If you don’t have any pennies to spare, that’s perfectly fine. Drop me a comment below and tell me how much pain I inflict on your households with my puns. Let me know how much damage I’ve done to your vocal cords, groaning at my punchlines. Keep me informed as to how much your friends and family whine when you relay one of my stories to them. The groans of “oh god, make him stop,” are like music to my ears.

Cheers, gang! You’re all awesome.

Cheers to Bruce Campbell, Badger, Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.

31 thoughts on “Directions & Pixels”

  1. Dont stop!! I love it! Very cool idea! Also, thanks for leaving the GIMP thing free. I will be looking at it when I have time (whenever or whatever that is)!!! Cool shark too 🙂

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    1. Thank you very much, you’re welcome, and there’ll be a few mentions of th course next week when I publish it. 🙂

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  2. Also, sorry i’m a commenter, that dark skinny thing looks like an Enderman! Little boys are always watching or playing that Minecraft stuff around me and I always go back to it too. LMAO endermans (is that right? now im confused) used to scare the heck out of me when I would be “walking around” at night. Learned how to get em tho 😉

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    1. The tall black critters, I know the ones you’re talking about, haha. They’re baddies, right? Hopefully, Etta will be nicer than them! 😛

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    1. I’d say subscribe to know when I release the courses with the usual free for 5 days, thing. But ya already are, haha.

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  9. • How about a series using fingerprints as bodies with sketched body parts?
    • Or a series of bacterium (lots of sub-plots with bacteria).
    • Cosmic bodies (planets, stars, asteroids, moons, etc. The Roman/Greek names would be fun to see.)
    -am

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    1. Cosmic bodies, I still really want to finish the astrology series of characters. I was going to return to each for a series of horrors like Denver and Malcolm’s story in the Capricorn series. I did a series for Aries, which never got posted, and never did the rest of them. Sigh I gotta lotta writing to do!

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