It’s also time to kick off Shades’ second short story, “Family Is...”  I’m super excited.  It has some of the most adorable drawings of Ten in it ever.  :D  AND I’m sketching the whole thing out ahead of time, so I should (knock on wood) have no problem keeping up with weekly updates of it until it’s finished.

Switching tracks slightly…

Some of you might remember me having a donation drive around this time last year to pay for another year of domain hosting costs for this site.  It’s the same song and dance this year:  I plan on keeping the comic running no matter what, but any help anyone wants to give would be amazing and greatly appreciated.

It costs $119.40 to host the site yearly.  There’s still a little extra left over from last year’s donations, so this year the goal is to raise $116.47.

If you’d like to help offset Shades’ hosting costs, you can use this link here:

This button puts money directly towards the hosting bill, but has a $10 minimum.  If you’d like to donate a lesser amount, please consider using the paypal button in the left sidebar.

Thank you all so much for reading, commenting, and supporting this comic in all the ways you do.  The support you guys give is amazing and helps more than you’ll ever know.  ♥♥♥

Hahah, oops!  Almost forgot the vote incentive.  We just recently were given an old N64 and some games, including Pokemon Snap.  Oh my god.  I completely forgot how much fun that game is.  Just… how is something that simple and featuring such poor graphics so addictive and fun?  I don’t even…  This sketch (with Ten and Kiva inserted to make it relevant!) is a fairly accurate portrayal of how my fiance and I have been spending a decent chunk of our together time since we got the game.  Aw Mew.

Next week I’m going to kick off the next short story in the bonus page section.  Prepare yourselves for… young teenage Ten!  This week’s vote incentive is a sneak peak of the story’s cover art.  Don’t forget you can vote everyday if it strikes your fancy.  The higher ranked the comic is, the more likely it is new readers will find it.  :)

In honor of finally getting my garden going (first one I’ve been able to have in years!), this week’s vote incentive is plant-themed.  And it pretty much sums up this year’s gardening experience so far!

This week’s vote incentive is a “what if” sort of deal.  Specifically, what would it be like if Jovi and Ten had met when they were younger?  Adventures for sure.  And apparently Ten would’ve tried to sell Jovi on picking up a fuzzy little pet of his own.  Jovi’s the equivalent of a 12 year-old here, and Ten’s about 11.

So, crisis over, the comic is back on schedule and is picking up on everyone’s first day back after their unexpected mini vacation.  Some time off does wonders.

Drawing your attention to the fanart section, geneseepaws sent me a lovely picture for my birthday.  Thank you, genesee!

For this week’s vote incentive, I did a little animation concept drawing of Ten.  Simpler shading, less color layers, etc.  It’s something I think about every now and again.  I’d love to do short animations for the comic.  It’d be lots of fun to actually get to see these guys in motion (and learn how to animate )… but… then reality smacks me in the face and reminds me I have other things to do.  :(  I’m hoping I might find some time to start fiddling with some simple rough animations this summer and try to work my way up from there.

In the meantime, I’m gonna look really hard at this drawing and wonder if maybe this wouldn’t be a better shading style for the comic.  Quicker and cleaner vs. detailed, looser, more time consuming.  Hrm.  

This has been a pretty terrible week for me, so I didn’t get to do a proper vote incentive.  Instead, enjoy a few doodles of Kiva from my sketchbook.

A few minor changes to the site:

I updated the Support the Comic page so the commission section was better explained and nicer looking, and I also fiddled with the donation section a bit.  Under the Extras page I deleted the page that popped up when you click on the Bonus Pages image.  Now it just takes you right to them.

EDIT:  I apologize  but there’s not going to be a comic update for this upcoming Friday (4/12).  There’s been a pretty big medical crisis in my family.  My dad’s in the hospital, and while he pulled through from his surgery and the doctors are starting to be more and more positive about his prognosis, my head’s just not in a good space right now, certainly not one that makes me want to draw.  I’ll try to have something for the following week (4/19).

Thank you for reading.

For this week’s vote incentive, enjoy some vaguely Easter-ish Ten!  He’s got flowers anyway.

I also want to draw your attention to two great comics I’ve been reading lately.  They’re both short (aka easy to catch up on!) and beautifully illustrated.

The first is Ava’s Demon, suggested to me by SRES a while ago (Thank you!  I meant to post this up ages ago!)  It’s a panel-at-a-time sort of comic, but it’s great so far and just so pretty.  Plus it occasionally has little animated shorts between chapters!

The second is Mystery Babylon, which has nice professional-looking artwork and probably the best paced plot and dialogue I’ve ever come across.

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There’s something different down here today!  Gasp!

I’m thinking of changing how I handle the whole donation/bonus page thing.  Up until now it’s been $20 of total donations = a bonus page.  In theory, not bad.  In practice, it tends to be long stretches of nothing broken up by small bursts of “omigod I suddenly have multiple pages to do and I’m behind on all these things aaaahhh”.

Instead, I’m thinking I might start posting the occasional bonus page when I have the time to do so, and just take the donations as straight up “hey I like your comic” donations.  I can space out bonus pages better that way, and more importantly it’ll make it easier to put out short stories because, man do I have a lot of those to tell.  (Seriously… at least 7 more besides the 3 I mentioned a few pages back.)

So, unless there’s a massive outcry against it, I’m going to retire the whole $20 = bonus page routine and go with the new plan.

Oh, though that does change the whole “short story incentive to raise funds for hosting the site” thing, doesn’t it?  Ah well.  I suppose I’ll just flood you guys with fun stories anyway and trust things will work out in the end.  :)

Guh… I spent a good two hours playing around with the word bubbles on this page, experimenting with how it would look if I drew the circles by hand so they’d be unique and interesting, or how they’d look with straight edges and angles.  After two hours I finally gave in and admitted that the quick and easy old way looks best.

The new vote incentive will be up shortly.  Busy week!  This week’s vote incentive: some upcoming characters that I felt like drawing!  Originally I was just going to draw the guy in the middle, but he looked too sad and lonely by himself.  So here ya go… Raj, Tikav, and Akiba.

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Progress towards the next bonus page: $5/$20

(Donate any amount of money by clicking the ‘donate’ button in the left sidebar. Each time we reach $20 in total donations, I’ll post another bonus page of extra story.)

This week’s vote incentive: Malaiki and the only person he’s ever liked.

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Progress towards the next bonus page: $5/$20

(Donate any amount of money by clicking the ‘donate’ button in the left sidebar. Each time we reach $20 in total donations, I’ll post another bonus page of extra story.)

I’m so proud of this week’s vote incentive.  I actually had time to sit down and do a good one and it’s Tattle-themed!  I got inspired by a song my fiance Luke stumbled across that had us dancing around to it on repeat because it’s just so damn catchy.  Who would guess that you could mash a Nine-Inch-Nails song with “Call Me Maybe” and it would come out so awesome?  Give it a listen, I dare you.  On that note (haha) I updated Tattle”s playlist to include three more songs and… I think I’m going to call it finished.  I’m happy with the story it tells and I can’t think of anything else to add or change.  First completed list, woohoo!

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Progress towards the next bonus page: $5/$20

(Donate any amount of money by clicking the ‘donate’ button in the left sidebar. Each time we reach $20 in total donations, I’ll post another bonus page of extra story.)