I’ve finally found it in me to practice making a grungier art style, something I had put down for well over a year or so now: while I will be keeping and updating my anime-inspired art style I’m known for, what I really want to work on is dirtier, more mental health focused art inspired by the works of Rob Zombie and Junji Ito along with shows like Ren & Stimpy, and I want to potentially draw both styles together in projects like the horror comic I’m trying to develop

I’d love to know what people think of this new direction for my work, I can’t wait to fully develop this style!

Over the past year my output had taken a hit due to an ulcer that snuck up behind me and I’ve spent most of that time regaining my strength, as of right now I’m waiting on another inspection to diagnose the remainder of my current condition but otherwise I’ve regained a lot of my strength in the past month alone, and after a two week vacation to continue recovering after this weekend I have plans to finally pick my larger projects back up, along with some new ones:

First will be a one-off gag comic starring my bee OC Donna, eight pages made to look like a physical manga scanlation from the 00’s, which I hope to frame as a mix between an Always Sunny skit and the manga scenes from FLCL;

Next is finishing an animation practice I started last year, animating for fun an animatic I found of Rouge the Bat by ShoutingIsFun as half fan art for them and half practice as my first time fully animating a meme cartoon, with hopefully more completely original ones to come later on;

Lastly is another, much larger comic, one I’ve been plucking away at the script of for two years now, it’ll be a psychological horror based on my experiences living with schizophrenia loosely inspired by Silent Hill 2, Twin Peaks and many other horror media that I love, and just this past week I finally finished the first quarter of the script’s final draft, which I put up on my patreon for now but will pluck away at illustrating the six chapters of after the one-off to gauge interest in as a full story before finishing the other three quarters of the script and illustrating those.

I really hope that my upcoming works will intrigue and inspire, knowing others love my work as they do is the most important thing to me. In spite of my health this past year I am not going to give up on my art, and I only ask you to come along for the ride as I push myself towards further heights.

I’ve had an epiphany: My art has strayed too far from its original intent, that being speaking to mental health. I’m going to take a new direction towards the darker, more thought-provoking art I want to make, and what I’ve been making lately will go on the backburner.

The art I will be making will try to be more like Taxi Driver in tone - raw, vulgar, and at times uncomfortable - and if that’s not your thing then you’re welcome to turn away.

The warning has been provided, if you didn’t see it at first then that will be on you. I don’t want to make any more art that eats away at my creativity and soul. That’s all I have to say on the matter. Have a pleasant day.

Now that my health is back up enough to make more art, I finally got around to opening up a Patreon for my work: I’m still working on content to fill it with, namely the script to my webcomic I’m developing, but currently it has a portfolio of my art, and more importantly a readable copy of the novella I wrote and want to publish someday.

I look forward to seeing some of you there!

https://www.patreon.com/r3znor_x

I finally was able to set up a Bluesky account today, from here I will be using it instead of Twitter:

https://bsky.app/profile/r3znorx.bsky.social

This past week I had a near-death experience with an ulcer that I never knew I had, I had to get a transfusion to counteract just how much blood I lost and as of today I’m back from the hospital: I’m unable to eat certain types of food or take in caffeine for at least a very long time from now, meaning I won’t have nearly enough energy to make any substantial art for just as long, if I do attempt to it will no longer be within a few days, so for the time being my productivity will be at a snail’s pace to what it had been before, I have a lot to do to recover and cope with the experience…

I’ve had an idea I’ve floated around for a while now about donating a portion of the money I make off of my work to a mental health charity, since the topic of mental health has a through-line in all of my art, and today I think I’ve finally decided that it’ll be the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, as it’s something I struggle with and would be the most direct way to communicate my work’s message.

I’ve begun to notice a trend with my work that is leaving me dissatisfied with its direction it’s taking: I’ve been moving into the direction of a simpler, cuter and overall easier art style that goes against what I originally set out to work towards but has developed specifically because it’s what gets the most attention out of my work across my social medias, which I’ve been justifying to myself as a necessary evil in order to accomplish my goal of developing a large enough following for when I finally start publishing the chapters of my webcomic.

I feel something I need to do in the near future is take a step back and reevaluate the choices I’ve been making with my art, to start from scratch and get back on track to working towards a grittier, dirtier art style that actively reflects what I want the most out of my art; the only issue is that I can’t at the moment, I’m preparing to move on Monday and after such I need to prioritize my queue which has gotten fuller than I’m used to, all I can make at the moment is art that’s smaller-scale, simpler and takes less time and focus to finish, and unfortunately that homogenous style I’ve found myself being boxed into fits perfectly into that criteria.

I want to break out of it as soon as humanly possible, but as time passes it seems like that opportunity is drifting further and further out of reach, at least for the time being…

With my most recent work as of writing this, the Madness Combat fanart, I’ve been thinking of ways to fully implement the new effect I had created with it into my future work: I could see about directly tinkering with the effect itself with different colors and levels of transparency from here to make it suited to each and every work’s tone, especially the grunge art style that I still wish to develop.

Possibly the biggest implementation will be the effect being added into the backgrounds and horror elements of the webcomic I’m wanting to publish to make both stand apart from the characters and give the visual aesthetic of the comic a grimier, less safe feeling to it than I was initially going to go for.

This also applies to the mural project once I start coloring that, where the only thing in the mural that doesn’t have any of the effect on it will be Derrik to make them stand out from the rest of the mural’s characters and the background.

I’m really excited to further practice this novel style aesthetic, I’m really hoping for it to greatly improve the quality of my art overall, potentially faster than at any other previous time.

One thing I’ve made a habit of in order to motivate my work further is to actively engage with the positive support my work receives: Not only do I encourage and reply to the responses I get, I’ve made a notes list of all of the individual aspects of my art that people have pointed out as positive features and each supportive comment I receive, no matter where I receive it or who it’s from, I save in a photo album to revisit later.

If you enjoy my work, by all means tell me, it means everything to me to hear what you like about it, more so than any money I could make off of it!