Weeblys Quirks; Site Update

I've updated my website some with new content. You might notice the art section of my site has changed. Before I kept everything under a single section, but now that I've begun to make progress towards my goals and have more types of art I want to put up, I decided to break everything out into sections. One is for a character design portfolio whereas the other is for general art. My personal art section is a little empty at the moment as I wanted to take things in a new direction and I've been super busy with other things like creating a character design portfolio. Now that I'm done with that I can focus more on getting back to doing personal art which I'm looking forward to. You'll also notice my home page has been redesigned. There was only a single image up there as I wasn't sure what to put, but now that I've gotten my personal brand built up a little further I figured it was time for redesign.

Now besides that, Weebly has a couple of pain points I’m not a big fan of it.

Its editor is pretty easy to use and the ability to edit HTML/CSS manually for custom design is great, although I find I have to do it a lot because Weebly is relatively bare bones. The templates aren’t that plentiful and the ones they do have tend to look the same, so you really have to dig in there with custom code to vary it up. There’s also the issue of the header which is fixed in place and scrolls with the page. That was a nightmare to fix via CSS, but it had to be done.

Next up is the issue of content management. Nothing you upload gets stored as there is no content library. That means every time you upload a new image or any other file, it wont be saved. You’ll have to reupload it which is a pain when you have to redesign a page and it requires you to re-add your content back to it. With other website editors like Wix, you have an actual content library so it makes redesigning pages much easier as you only need to reselect your already added content to add it back on the page. You might wonder, well why not just use Wix in that case?

The primary issue is that its WAY too slow.

Its slow to the point of being unusable and I have no clue why. I’ve researched on why that is and never got an answer. If anything after all the research I did, what I learned the most was that practically everyone else who uses Wix also said it was slow with no known way of fixing it. Another issue, albiet not as big, is that Wix’s page container can’t be expanded past 980 px. The company said its because they want their websites to work well on mobile and web although to me that seems to be one of the worst approaches by forcing the user to stick to 980px or go full screen rather than access a lot of that inbetween space. Case in the point the typical monitor resolution in todays day is 1920 px. Being forced to choose between 980 px at most or just jump to 1920 px leads a lot of whitespace on the screen that could be used. Maybe for most people its not a big deal, but for artists and other creative types we like to have as much usable space as possible. Between these two issues, it’s enough to keep me away from Wix, especially given Weebly allows for HTML/CSS and JS custom code to edit your site however you want.

A third issue is image caching. I’ve noticed Weebly is one of the few editors where when you upload an image to replace the current one, if both files have the same name, the new one will not be uploaded. Come to find out after some research, this is a caching issue as Weebly apparently doesn’t clear its cache whenever you upload files. The only way I’ve discovered to fix this is to remove the image in question, clear your browser cache, then close out of it, start it up and then reupload your new image. Its a pain to have to do for every little mistake you spot, but unfortunately Weebly doesn’t automatically clear the cache so you have to do it manually.

Still, despite its faults I think its one of the best editors out there.

Inktober 2020

I really enjoyed getting to work on Inktober last year and this year since I’m working remote rather than in office, I figured since I have the time, why not try doing a full marathon? As if 2020 wasn’t crazy enough…Inktober this year turned out to be a bit more than I bargained for…

My plan for tackling Inktober was to take it day by day and do the whole challenge. I started off pretty good, but after around the 5th or 6th prompt I started to run out of ideas and rather than continue onwards, I wanted to complete each prompt. As you can imagine, that pretty much threw me off track and I spent most of Inktober trying to catch up to the current prompt of the day. It was stressful to say the least and after a while I did manage to catch up, but when I hit prompt 25 (out of 31) I pretty much hit my limit and decided to call it done.

On retrospect looking back at it, I actually think it did some good.

The main thing it taught me was that the point of Inktober isn’t necessarily to do the whole challenge, but rather it’s to push yourself into being consistent by doing art on a daily basis. On that regard I think I exceeded my expectations because of how determined I was throughout it. Although there were 6 prompts I didn’t do, I might go back to finish them one day.

A Fresh Start

This has been a crazy year…and my first blog post in quite a while since 2019! It feels good to be back blogging.

So I think for most of us this year has been wild. With Covid hitting and the global shutdown, its not been easy. Since in March I’ve been working remotely for my job and its been pretty solid. The drive to the studio was a really long one I had to do every day, but fortunately they decided to switch us to a work from home approach where now I can avoid that nightmare. I also had to skip going to Comic Con, which I had been going to for the last 3 years in a row since Covid shut down practically everything.

I’ve not been working on art much since I’ve been quite busy with work and also, I think its healthy to take breaks every now and then which is something I find a lot of artists don’t really do. The mentality is often to keep forging ahead and while I can understand doing that because you don’t want to lose momentum, I think it can hurt more than help in the long run because of burnout risks and you miss out on the chance of simply taking a step back to observe where you currently are. The principal is really the same thing as doing an art piece. You could work on a big piece for hours in a row, but doing so often leads to tunnel vision where you miss mistakes that you can easily catch if you step back for a bit, then come back to work on it later.

Also I’ve decided to create a new Twitter account (same username). I felt my old one was getting stagnant and wanted to a fresh start. Perhaps from time to time I’ll add announcements on my website too. I find Twitter is great for getting the in-the-moment messages out, but its not that great when it comes to archival purposes. A website will do that much better than Twitter and frankly any social media ever will.

I’m not expecting much for blog posts for this year as there’s been a lot on my plate, but perhaps next year things will get back to more normal circumstances and I’ll be in a better spot to do blogging.

Inktober Completed!

I've completed this years inktober challenge! I figured a blog post would be a good idea since I'd like to share my experience with it and I've not been writing blog posts as often as I wanted to lately. So to start, my goal with Inktober was to push myself by going through the challenge of creating artwork on a daily basis. Its something I've never been that good at, but had been getting better with it over the past few months and figured Inktober would be a great way to test just how consistent I really am.
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Well that turned out to be a harder challenge than I anticipated. In the weeks coming up to Inktober, things started to get busier for me with jobs and in particular with my art portfolio after having went to the Portfolio Reviews in Comic Con this summer. I found myself not having much free time and initially backed out of doing Inktober, yet still wanted to do the challenge so I went in anyways, without a plan.

​There was one thing I did have in mind for it and that was to create an inktober piece every other day, starting on Oct 1 and ending on Oct 31st. That would amount to 16 drawings which I thought would've made it a bit easier while still keeping consistency, but once I began the challenge I started to realize that I didn't have enough time in the day to do them and had to resort to working on them on my even numbered days. In short, I still ended up spending every single day of the month working on Inktober.

My ideas on what to do for Inktober were each done at random, although I tried to keep the theme mostly focused on halloween as it is October! I had some ideas in mind for a witch girl character I had previously designed and wanted to use. Sometimes I wanted to draw other things, so that prompted me to create other characters based off halloween. There were other times where I was completely clueless on what to draw and ended up doing something random such as the mermaid piece. I did some of my pieces with storytelling in mind rather than a solo character to mix it up and try something new. For my final piece, I felt was a good idea to draw most of the characters I had created during inktober.

My workflow started off in Photoshop for the first drawing, but I noticed that I didn't like inking much in it. With the way the brushes work in Photoshop, inking tends not to feel that natural. In Procreate the inking tools felt better and after around the 4th/5th drawing, I started getting used to it. In fact I've noticed that the remainder of my Inktober pieces turned out to be more detailed as time went on. That may however just be due to drawing on the iPad being more natural than a Wacom Intuos (what I have) and that in turn is more enjoyable, thus I want to draw more.

Inktober was definitely a challenge worth undertaking. I've become better in terms of creating artwork on a consistent basis (posting consistently online is another story), drawing as a whole as well as having gained 16 new artworks to add to my collection, but the biggest thing I've gained is learning that finishing something is more important than making it perfect. I've found that I actually want to draw more when I don't focus on trying to make things perfect which was something as artists we tend to forget about at the end of the day. I'd say for those who have reservations about doing Inktober, try it anyways and see how it goes. You might gain more out of it than you realize 🙂. 

Tackling My First Inktober

It’s the month of Inktober! This is an art challenge I've wanted to participate in for some time now and I said this year will be it. As someone who loves drawing with pencils although not so much inking, I figured it was an area that was somewhat neglected and could be improved. Initially I decided to create an Inktober drawing for every day of the month, but that changed as I unexpectedly just landed my first job out of university! Although while I'm excited about that, I also realized that I'd not have the time to do an Inktober drawing every day.

Since I still want to do Inktober, I think a better approach would be to do an Inktober drawing every other day. Its not a full set of Inktober drawings, but it’s still something I can look back on one day to say I still went for it anyways.

As far as posting, I'll share it on Instagram and Twitter. Once Inktober is finished, I'll post up the drawings here on my website.