I love Natsumi's expression in this illustration.

No new comic this week. I have one in the works, but it's taking longer than I'm willing to put the effort into today, so it's going to be next week that we continue the current chapter "The Team Up."

I know that sucks. You don't get a new comic.

I don't get a sense of accomplishment.

I love making the art but I also want to relax. It's been a long week, and this weekend I'm choosing the latter (as I do every weekend). The new comic is close to being done, but by close I mean probably another good five hours or so and doing that last five hours right now feels like a slog. I don't need to kill myself over this, so I can work on it next week and release it next Saturday.

But that doesn't mean there isn't new art to view!

This week's post is actually some new art I created this week to experiment with Clip Studio's 3D material features. Mainly, I wanted to see if I could turn my Blender props into Clip Studio materials.

Behind the Scenes

Last Sunday I was messing around with Clip Studio's 3D features and composed this:

I took the original Heartwing staff model I created in Blender and turned it into a Clip Studio material using the Clip Studio Modeler tool. To do that I turned the Blender model into an FBX format and imported it into the Modeler. I had to google how to use it, but it wasn't too difficult. The hardest part was scaling the staff so it wasn't gigantic in the tool.

Once I had my custom 3D material I opened Clip Studio Paint and dropped it in from the material list along with another 3D asset I pulled in, a baroque style bench I found on TurboSquid or Sketchfab, I don't remember which at this point since I downloaded it a year ago. That also existed as an FBX and was easy to register as a material. The figure comes from Clip Paint itself. I overlaid that figure with a sitting pose that I manipulated into the one you see above.

My sketch over...

Once I sketched Natsumi, I did my usual high contrast style over top. All in all, this piece took about five hours (so, if you're counting that's where the five hours went, I suppose) and I really like the look of it.

How about you, how do you deal with balancing your life between creative pursuits, relaxation, and you know, all the other things inbetween?

That's all for this weekend. I hope you have a great and relaxing weekend. Happy Lunar New Year to those of you celebrating that. See you next week!