Although only one fully-finished cartoon was published this year, a lot has been in progress aside from it; 2021 began with me working on an alternative rock/metal (I'll let the listeners determine the genre when it's out) album. I have lyrics for a dozen songs finished and about half of them have been recorded and mixed, while the rest are still in the works! I spent months and months, on-and-off learning about pass filtering and equalization for each instrument as well as vocals (and have been learning more how to sing)! I've tinkered with audio editing for many years, but 2021 was the one where I really went all out with it. I still have much to learn, but overall I'm happy with how it's all coming out! The album should be released for free whenever I finish it, probably next year!
Also during the beginning of 2021, I started on my very first webcomic, Interromantica! My goal was to publish one chapter per month, but even the first chapter took me a lot longer than I thought it would. So I just left it as-is with one chapter. Had lots of fun making it and I liked the way it came out, and though I do have plenty of ideas for the consecutive chapters, for now it will be left to sit on its own. It just took up valuable animation time!
Speaking of animation, I started on a big battle sequence soon after the release of the first chapter; I hinted at it a handful of times this year as well as showed a preview of it late Summer, but it's still undergoing production. It got left on the backburner here-and-there as other projects and life stuff just kept coming up. But it's still going strong, and I can't wait to finish it! Having so much fun animating it.
One of the projects that interrupted it was one I did entirely from my free will, And the Final Smash Character Is..., which turned out to be the one and only cartoon uploaded for 2021. Knowing the final DLC character for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was about to be released, I hustled and got it out just a couple of days before Sora was announced.
JUST BEFORE THAT, however, since Madness Day 2021 was approaching and I knew I didn't have time to do a full Madness cartoon, I quietly released the first patch update to Madness Gemini, the game I made for Madness Day 2019. Added some effects, fixed some bugs, threw in a few extra music tracks, and updated the menu with a weapons and enemies database. Just made it a bit more playable and fun (I think, anyway), overall.
Afterward, I wanted to end the year with another cartoon, which... wound up not happening, sadly, because yet another roadblock approached: Adobe Flash Pro CS6, the program I've been using to animate for many years, finally took a dump on me; no matter what I tried, no matter what drivers I used, what settings I tinkered with, what I screwed around with with my drawing tablet... it was just too laggy. It seemingly started doing this out of nowhere. So, much to my initial dismay, I transferred my main animation software to Toon Boom Harmony 21. At first I was reluctant to doing this, as there were so many things I liked about Flash and I was just plain used to it. But, after just a couple months with my good friend Crashgen teaching me on how to use it, I got the hang of it and now I can't believe I haven't started using Toon Boom earlier! I really love it, progress has been so much faster with it! That being said, the learning curve slowed down production of the cartoon, so it won't be done until early next year. Following that? I'll get back to the battle animation.
Throughout all of this, I've been drawing! Feel free to check out my gallery to see what I released. I'm always trying to improve, and this year I like how a handful of some stuff I tried came out, overall. Still got plenty more to practice on, so get ready for 2022! Follow me here or any of my other social media pages that best suit you if you're interested! I may start doing commissions again down the line.
2021 was a good year. Strange and unexpected in many ways, but very great in others. I can't wait for what 2022 will bring, I AM SO EXCITED!! Get ready FOR VIDEOS AND SOME OTHER THINGS!! See you then!
-T4k