Setting up the Summer

As of writing this, I have a show at The Gallery Seven on July 23 during Comicopolis 2022! There you can find my traditional ink comic pages framed in Lockport, Illinois. I never thought I’d be able to do this, but I’m glad it’s happening, and I hope you’ll stop by and see my original pages!

Gallery Seven Shirley'd Day All Steps Frame Prep
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Massive May Marker Art

This month has been my most successful month of the year saleswise for my art! Anime Central was this month, and it’s a huge one! It’s a good sign that can sunset my time at my day job to take a big plunge into full time art. But I’m sure this is wishful thinking.

At Anime Central 2022
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The Pizza Man on Etsy and More Store News!

I have some store news for you all! There’s new stuff on my Etsy Store, Ko-Fi Page, and Redbubble. I’m a busy bee indeed!

The Pizza Man Now on Etsy!

I’ve finally got my comic, The Pizza Man, is printed and up for sale on my Etsy Store! It’s a 60 page 5 in by 7.5 in Black and White Book. The largest comic I’ve ever done by far!

After years after finishing the original Instagram challenge, arranging the pages together, scraping up funds out of my own pocket, I finally have print books to sell to you all!

The Pizza Man Print Comic

To remind you all, The Pizza Man is an improvised story about a simple pizza delivery driver, who must drive through insane obstacles to complete his order on time!

The Pizza Man Print Comic Interiors A

This story was completed in June 2020 for the Journey June Art Streak challenge. Journey June is an art challenge for those who want to improve their storytelling.

The Pizza Man Print Comic Interiors B

I took it one to the suggestion of my friend, but I wanted to see if I could do a comic sequence every day for 30 days. It was stressful, and I thought the story was getting too complicated, but it’s a nice notch in my art-making belt!

Mastafran All Comics 2022
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Art and Con Prep

It’s been a productive start to my new year. Despite nursing a head cold, I had for the first few weeks, I made plenty of art to prepare for the coming year!

On February 12th, I’ll be tabling at Northwest Indiana Comic-Con! It’s the first time in two years that I’ve tabled at a con!

Northwest Indian Comic-Con 2022 Announcement

The things you’ve seen on my Etsy Store, you can get them at the con! This comes with the added benefit of meeting me in person and having a chat!

Cole's Cup

If you don’t know what you want to buy from me or have everything I have to offer, from my comics to my stickers, I opened a Ko-fi page as a tip jar. You can drop a small tip to me and commend my efforts!

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Running to the New Year

It’s almost the new year and I look back on 2021 with thoughts. It started out with promise, but I think it went downhill closer to the end. I can’t help but say I felt directionless and the stuff I’ve been doing wasn’t as amazing as I’d like for it to be.

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Altered Book Plans

I have bad news and good news about working on my self-published comics.

Some bad news is that I changed my mind about making The Pizza Man a book. Good news is: I’m going to put The Pizza Man, Shirley’s Day and Incident at the Game Store, in one bigger book!

I made several proofs, and I was just about to go forward on buying prints, but I realized that instead of sitting on many floppy comics that don’t sell that much, I’d make a big trade paperback containing not just my comics work so far, but behind the scenes stuff like my original pencil art and inks! I can even include other illustrations and sketches in the book to show off more of my artwork!

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Commissions, Writing and Working

The Indie Real Time Strategy game, Furs of Fury is out now! You might remember me making a large illustration of it a while ago! I’m currently plugging away on an article about the making of this painting, so stay tuned for that!

Furs of Fury Game Illustration

I’ve been taking art commissions for the past few weeks as I’m looser on time and I had bills to catch up on. I’ve been posting them on Twitter, Instagram and livestreaming my work on Twitch! If you’re interested in taking a commission, stop by my page for information and fill out a form!

check out some more process stuff!

Making Edits

I remain active with my work, working on art, editing webjunk, and doing what I do to the best of my skills! Here’s what I’ve been up to the past few days:

I’m making some new edits to this website. You’ll be seeing some rearranged pages. Links might crash or break, and you’ll see some placeholder art for where I want to put buttons.

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Bumbling and Scrambling

Life’s been unpredictable for the past few weeks with doing extra hours at my day job, getting work done on Flawless Extraordinary Super Heroes, and Adam’s doing his own freelance stuff. I even took a short break away from art and the internet to reground myself and organize.

At the moment, I’m stuck on some things with Blackmask. I’m learning more workflows and thinking of a direction for making the background tile assets.

Right now, I’m learning new tips from pixel artists like MortMort, CupOhJoe and LumpyTouch when I can. I’ve also been trying out converting my art into pixels from 2D Will Never Die, It’s promising, but I’m not as happy with the current results.

Blackmask Game Island Dark Jungle Environment Pixel Art

My Twitch streaming schedule has also started to slip. Sometimes, I have a hard time getting into a headspace to entertain and draw for streams after work. I did one game stream to shake up my rut, but my machine isn’t good enough to play often. It might be a productive way to relax, but I don’t want to make my Twitch about gaming considering people followed me for my art.

Besides this, I’m staying a float, sporadically posting on my Twitter and Instagram. Most of my sketches I post there are environment concept sketches for Blackmask.

Sketching has taken a bit of a back seat more toward thumbnailing and writing game ideas down during my bus driving.

Despite having not much going on, I keep feeling a pressure on myself to do better than I currently am. I never feel confident that these sketches are interesting enough to post on my socials because they aren’t characters. I have a bad enough time thinking about social media as it is!