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Well, 2025 was certainly... a year that we lived through!
Sticking strictly to the art, the year started out pretty sparse as I was mostly working very slowly on assets for my Beast Machines project. It's pretty apparent I was struggling with that a bit, since I couldn't even scrounge up an unfinished sketch from half of the months. It might also be pretty apparent at what point in the year I finally got back on ADHD meds after going nearly 20 without.😅
Speaking of things drastically shifting, I know some on my main blog might have been wondering where I've been for the last half of the year. Admittedly I did almost completely pivot to an unplanned project based around my original fandom from back in the Paleolithic Era which got me into drawing in the first place, that being Dragon Ball Z. If anyone is interested in reading a fan-manga based in that world (and actually want to see consistent art updates which honestly still surprises even me) head on over to my side blog @dragontron3000. I'm hoping to have the end of chapter 3 done by the end of the year, meaning I've managed to draw nearly 90 pages of manga this year! This still blows my mind, as anytime I'd ever tried to do a comic before, I could rarely get past page 3. Those meds really worked! lol
That being said, while I am feeling a little guilty for sort of dropping Beast Machines Reformatted, I'm really glad I made the pivot. If nothing else, it's really opened my eyes to the parts of art that I enjoy doing, and the parts that make it feel like an absolute slog. As it turns out... I kinda really hate the process of coloring! That might surprise y'all a bit since I'm sort of known for my bright, vibrant colors and crisp rendering style -- and don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the way the finished pieces look when fully rendered -- but the actual process of it always felt like a complete slog. It was just something I felt I had to do if I wanted something I could say was complete.
That perspective sort of changed when I started working on this black and white manga, and where before I'd be lucky to get a single piece done in a month and have to drag myself through half of it, suddenly I'm regularly posting a fully-inked update roughly every two days and without dreading a huge chunk of the process. Art became almost addictive again, and I found myself almost unable to put down something I started as a self-indulgent side project.
I'm sure you're wondering what that means for Beast Machines Reformatted, arguably a self-indulgent project in itself. Well, I haven't forgotten about it. Hell, pretty much the entire story is planned out, so it'd be a shame to waste it. I do still plan on working on it, but I may be shifting formats slightly. Again. Sorry. Having been able to stick with this manga for way longer than any other visual project I've ever done before, I really feel like that's sort of my optimal format for visual storytelling. As such, I'd really like to refocus that project into a manga as well. I'm not sure when it'll start, but I'm hoping sometime in 2026. I really don't want to kill the momentum I've got for Dragonball Valhalla either, so I think once I've gotten my speed up to where I can consistently finish a page a day, I might bounce back and forth between the two, aiming to finish a page for each project every other day since that seems like a decent pace for page-by-page releases. Besides, I kinda already have several pages thumbnailed out from back when I had it planned as an American-style full-color comic that I only ever finished one page for 😅 I'll definitely keep y'all updated.
Anyway, enough of my yammering. Here's to a 2026 full of new art!
