Nanoreno 2013

It’s that time of year again. Since last march to this march I have learned that march has become a very busy month for me. With me working on getting the first volume of my comic book printed to also working on some webdesign side projects and now I’ve picked up some more work with trying to actually get a complete story finished for Nanoreno. Last year I was only able to push out a demo. I still plan on releasing the touched up story. I just have to finish the rest of the cg’s. It is taking me a lot longer then I would have hoped but once march madness ends I should be able to have a lot more free time since my book should be off to the printers in April and then after that I’ll just be on curse control with my comic updates because of the buffer that I built. So I’ll finally be able to put all of my focus into finishing up the two stories that had to be put on hold because of new work coming up.

I at first wasn’t going to enter into Nanoreno this year because I wasn’t able to finish last year’s entry but I decided to go ahead and give it another go because practice makes perfect and I’ve learned from a lot of my first timer mistakes. Like when your working on a story and all these cool idea’s for side paths pop into your heads so then I’m all like “Yeah! Let’s do this and that and this and make the story super deep.” Then when the deadline rolls around I end up in a boat load of unfinished work because I didn’t pace myself and got carried away.

This time I can definitely see a very big difference in my work progress. Instead of doing 3 different paths with a super deep story plot I decided to only do two paths and have a simple story plot. Nice, short and sweet. Also I made sure to keep the cast to a minimum even though there were times when I wanted to add more but I had to fight against that urge.

Now with half of March almost finished I have been able to finish writing up the first path and finished 1 background and have two rough drafts of the sprites. Drawing the sprites and the backgrounds don’t take me nearly as long as the cg’s. Since this story has a kind of fairy tale feel to it, I decided to go with a sort of paintbrush type of background so that I can cut back on time also. I have one last path to write up; I hope to have it finished and emailed off to my very helpful proofreader, Jahnarah who by the way has a project of her own that she is working on and for a little plug I shall go ahead and post a link to her project. Go ahead and stop by and give her some encouraging words ^^

This year’s Nanoreno story is very simple and it’s about a troll who wants to have a fairy tale love story of her own, like those mushy happily ever afters but she’s a bit rough around the edges so she hasn’t had much luck in the love department but hopefully in this years festival that might change. The time frame for the story will only be 6 days. The two love interest in the story are a bit cliche since one is the unicorn prince and the other a fairy prince. I’ll post up more info about them when I get some more work finished. For those of you who haven’t already seen some the of rough drafts of the cast here they are below:

This time around I’m going to fight the feeling of being intimidated by drawing breath taking cg’s. I’m just going to draw the cg’s the best way that I can and the best way that I think it will get my point across and is most appealing to me. It’s that fear of not being able to live up to the standards of making a beautiful cg that kind of had me frozen in my tracks with Curse of the Caribbean and I found myself going back over and re-doing the rough sketches that I had because I was worried that it wasn’t good enough but now thankfully things have changed. I’m going to just focus on making stories that I am happy with and that I would be proud to show others. I can’t let my fears of not living up to someones standards hold me back with my writing or art.

So with that I’m going to keep on marching forward and try to get all of this work done before Nanoreno is over. I would have liked to do more frequent updates but I’ve been tired and frustrated that I kept holding it off but thankfully I was able to make a little progress report today.