Wednesday, February 17, 2021

V-Day, Part 3

Those of you who don't follow me on deviantART may not have seen the comic I posted there over the weekend.  It's the third installment in what has turned out to be a series of Valentine's Day-centric commissions from my frequent collaborator, TG author James Craft.

First, if you didn't see the previous two installments or don't remember them, here are the links to those as well:

https://beastv.blogspot.com/2017/02/diy-valentine.html

https://beastv.blogspot.com/2018/02/anything-you-can-do_14.html

And this is the most recent and hopefully final installment:






To be honest, I initially lost much of my enthusiasm for this commission once I realized it was essentially just a rehash of the last one: unwitting guy gets feminized by a sexy neighbor lady, aided by the guy she feminized in the last comic, and then they end up acting as maids for her and her friends.  It's starting to feel repetitive.  However, the truth is, being the perfectionist that I am, I was less than satisfied with how some of the artwork in the second part turned out, so I saw this as an opportunity to redeem myself, in a sense, by doing a better job this time around.  

I'm still quite proud of the first part, which I titled "DIY Valentine."  I think it worked perfectly well as a standalone thing and didn't need to be a series... or if James was going to turn it into a series, he could at least have tried to come up with a more intelligible plot while he was at it.  Anyway, I don't mean to grumble; I am pretty happy with how this third part turned out.  I ought to be, considering I spent probably the equivalent of a full work week on these two pages.  

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear RocketDave:

Your work is beautiful and always appreciated. It saddens me to think that some of your work might never see the light of day because of unreasonably high standards you may impose on yourself. Thanks for being willing to share it.
Jnynj

rocketdave said...

Thank you for the comment/compliment, Jnynj. Rest assured, I'm not sitting on some huge trove of artwork that I'm keeping all to myself... unless you count the unpublished comic commission I've been doing for James Craft, which I talked about in the blog entry I posted in December. If you count the panels of that comic as individual illustrations, then that's over a hundred drawings that practically nobody has seen... so far.

As I discussed in the blog, it has been highly frustrating for me to have spent all this time producing what I honestly believe is some of my best work to date, yet been unable to show it off. Because I tend to thrive on positive reinforcement, working in a virtual vacuum for so long has been somewhat detrimental to my creative process, perhaps making this project drag on longer than it should have. However, I continue to get closer to finally completing that comic, so hopefully it won't be too much longer before it can be shared with the world. I assume that even if I were to drop dead right now, James would still either publish the comic as is or enlist someone to finish it the last few pages for him. From what I've seen, Joe Six Pack can do a pretty decent job copying my style.

The work I worry about never seeing the light of day is all the art I haven't done because of laziness, lack of time and because most of my ideas never seem to get past the planning stage. As I said last time, I'd like to do more comics, but I suffer from what my sister once called "idea vertigo," where my ideas branch off into dozens of different directions and I'm so afraid of picking the wrong one that I can never seem to actually just sit down and start anything.

Anonymous said...

I suspect that what you describe as “idea vertigo is the flip side of the coin to having a creative mind. You have to take the good with the bad, so, again, cut yourself some slack. Please accept this as positive reinforcement, and keep up the great work.
Jnynj

juliadomna47 said...

Keep up the good work Dave you are a very talented artist and author as are other contributors especially Carrie in fact i would like to see a sequel to ASP as Carrie lefy the ending wide open for a follow up.