Doing What I Can

Staying busy with my art stuff for the last few weeks. I’m doing what I can to pack my days with activity and take my mind of things. I feel good when I’m focused on a project that I care about.

I did some “Brand Synergy” and renamed my web domain from “ryanfrancisart.com” to “mastafran.com.” Since my username on Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, Artstation, and Newgrounds gets me more search results of my art than my actual birth name, I’ll just use it for my general “brand.” It’s still the same site and if I set up my redirects right, the old site name should redirect to the new names. If there are any problems, feel free to message me.

I edited together a progress video of our game tentatively called “Cole Blackmask and the Scrolls of Soleon” or just “Blackmask” It’s a Game Boy styled action-platformer about a raccoon merchant adventuring an outlandish animal world for ancient magic scrolls of cataclysmic power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mual9nuoCd0&t=4s

This is actually older footage melded together but I wanted to have a bigger elevator pitch video to show off to people. There’s still so much to do before we have enough for a playable demo. The music isn’t even ours because it’s from Final Fantasy Legend 2, so the music stuff isn’t squared away yet.

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What I’ve Been Up To: Project Blackmask

If you’ve been following my art and this blog before 2020, you know that I draw a lot of anthropomorphic animal characters. These animals were ideas for characters and world for a webcomic idea that I was thinking about for the past nine years.

Cole the Weapon Seller

It would’ve been the ongoing adventures of a plucky adventure merchant named Cole Blackmask as travels to strange lands, questing for loot to sell, battling powerful warriors and mystical forces who reside all over this funny animal world.

Cole Jacket Poses
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What I’ve Been Up To: Busy, Busy!

I’ve been drawing small stuff to pay my bills, fill my portfolio, and staying busy. Despite, constantly feeling like I’m behind on everything I’m getting the things expected of me done.

Progress is being made working on the Illustrations on Flawless Extra-Ordinary Superheroes, knocking out a larger illustration and pushing forward to the next few ones.

Flawless Extra-Ordinary Super HeroesS.T.E.A.M. Intro
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Pardon the Mess

It’s been a while since I’ve updated anything online. Over the past few months, I’ve made an extremely sloppy transfer to Bluehost in a rough effort to improve my website. My big goal is to set up my website as my core hub for all of my web presence including where I’ll post and sell my comics and post my news. I’ll still have my typical social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram but I want to one day sunset them as I think they don’t do much to help me out in my art journey.

Adam Mortell, Ryan Cambruzzi, Vincent Rusca and I worked on a game for Global Game Jam this year. I’m bummed that I didn’t do more for the game but, I learned how to make pixel art for the first time.

You can play our game here!

Besides that, I’ve been tackling some new freelance artwork and commission stuff including working on a new book in the Flawless Extra-Ordinary Superheroes Series. With this, I’m still trying to fund printing for Incident at The Game Store in color but some car problems have come up so money’s lacking.