*crawls out of the gutter* It.. is… done… [News yap]

HI!

I’m BACK after that insane crunch to finish the art book in time for my next market!
Good lord my admin pile is atrocious. I haven’t been able to do my emails, DMs, shop orders, Kickstarter things, etc etc.

My brain is absolutely mush and this is the last day of the month which means it’s deadline day for comic page posts…

But let’s go through what’s been happening in a slightly organised way:

THE DOUBLE DICKIN’ BEAST PRINT

Thank you for all the pre-orders for the double dick beast! It has been sent off to print and I was very nervous that it’d be rejected for being a bit too… uh.. Obscene. (At which point I would’ve of course refunded all the pre-orders) – But to my delight the artwork team appear to have OK’d it and it is being printed as we speak!
According to the delivery time, the prints should arrive on my birthday in two days 😀 What a treat! I can’t wait to see what the “pearl white” foil looks like in person. And you do realise that this means we’re in Business. Now I can make all sorts of art prints with pearl white foil ifyouknowwhatImean.

THE SKETCHBOOK TURNED ART-BOOK

This has been an experience. Holy hell. I did the Catstarter (which is still live btw, I haven’t had time to close it yet – that’s another admin task), and got the print-run funded in a day! And to nobody’s surprise, the 50 page sketch-book turned into a 70 page art-book. It’s gone from costing me £5 per book to almost £8. Adding on packaging and postage material, it’s starting to eat into any profit I can make from these books. I am very good at business.

I still had things I wanted to add, but holding back is probably the sensible thing, thinking of cost, time and my sanity. Plus: If this book goes down well at my upcoming events, there will be more!

SO, I’ve been in talks with the printers over the last few days – essentially juggling two separate printers at the same time (one for the beast art and one for this book), and managing to mix them up at one point. Embarrassing for me, but luckily nothing major – I just sent the wrong response and order number, instead of sending a full on smut book to the wrong people.

The local printers who are doing my art book sent me this photo of a part of the cover after we’d been checking some colours, and I was so excited to see it be a real thing!

Yeah, you can see I’m calling it a “scrappy art-book”. Reason for that is that I don’t feel it’s a sketchbook anymore. There’s too much variety of stuff in there. But I also don’t feel like it’s a “proper” art-book. It doesn’t have that coffee-table-hard-back-big-posh-chonker-feel of an art-book. And the interior spreads look more collagey like.. well.. A scrapbook.

Plus, you can be Scrappy in the Gutter >:)

Hrm. Anyway. I had to go for a rush order on these books to make it in time for BBB, so to save money I’ve opted to go pick them up. They *should* be done before Wednesday.

ADMIN CATCH-UP

I’m slowly making my way through my emails and DMs (sorry!) and have been notified of some payment processing shenanigans (as usual), so I’m gonna need to look into CCBill’s payment gateway. Wouldn’t it be great if stuff just worked?

I’m also catching up on my shop orders. They all got a bit buried when I launched the Catstarter and got over 120+ orders in a short space of time. A great problem to have and I’m extremely thankful! Please be patient with me while I wade through it all to ship stuff :’)

Another admin thing has been to proof-watch an almost 2 hour long video interview I did where the interviewer had some really unfortunate audio issues and had to re-record their side in post, but you can hardly notice it and in fact the whole video is fantastic with all the work that’s gone into it to show art and comics etc on the screen.

I’ve OK’d it and can’t wait to show it to you once it goes live 🙂

Oh and finally:

REDFAN COVER BEING WORKED ON

Yeah this is what I’m doing today – with the deadline being in a few hours. All of my comic pages were pushed to the end of the month when the art book took up all of my time, and now we’re paying for it.

Best get back to it!