3D Background Models Preview

Hey hey! Back from another long disappearance! Busy busy, as usual.

I'm still working on my upcoming "Austin & Jennifer" comic book, and at this point in time I have a complete rough cut of the whole book which can be read from start to finish. Before I start the final line art, there were some background shots I roughly sketched in that definitely has to be fixed for the final line art.

Instead of guessing the perspective of those shots while drawing, I went ahead and took up learning the basics of Blender, a free 3D modeling program, and created basic models of the different environments featured in the comic.

I made a list of all the different environments, and just a few days ago I finally finished going through the entire list!

With that, I wanted to show off a preview of the end results:

Sure, there's no colors and lighting here, but the main purpose is to have a 3D set so that I can angle the camera view to my liking, snap a screenshot, and trace over said screenshot to get the perfect perspective of whatever shots I have in the comic.

Blender was a bit of a learning curve, but that curve wasn't too steep since I had taken classes on Maya, another 3D modeling program, some years ago, so it more of a matter of "translating" my knowledge of the Maya program with Blender.

There's still so much about Blender (and 3D modeling in general) that I'd like to learn more about and put into practice some day. If I ever get back into making animations and learn the grease pencil tool in Blender, I can probably make some killer-looking 2D animations!

My previous post mentioned that I was hoping for a 2026 release, but that's not gonna happen. I'm not gonna make any promises as to when the comic will be released since it's difficult to juggle between a dead-end job, GE classes, and just living a life overall.

I'm going to wait until I have enough progress to guesstimate a release window.

And with that, back I go into the unknown!

National Comic Book Day Preview

Hello hello! Back from the dead with a cool thing to show off!

It recently came to my attention that today, September 25th, 2025, is National Comic Book Day! And it just so happens that I'm working on a comic book! Can you believe it?

My last post (which was about a year ago, ouch) mentioned this fact, and it still holds true. I was hoping it would have been done by this year, but oh well. Stuff happens.

I'm aiming for a 2026 release, so stay tuned!

Anyways! Here's a work-in-progress preview of my upcoming comic book! Of course, everything is still in the rough phase and the art is subject to change.

Click through them for a larger view of each page.

No Halloween Art 2024

Important announcement from Mandy and Sally

No Halloween art this year unfortunately, but you can always go back and re-read the Halloween comic which is available to read and download on the blog! Just mosey on over to the "Neat Links" section in the top right sidebar and you'll find it!

The updated download now includes four additional bonus pages that were exclusive to the physical version of the comic! These pages have behind-the-scenes sketches and a look into how most of the pages were drawn up from roughs to final line art!

As Mandy said, I've been working on a new comic lately at a snail's pace, which means I didn't have time to get around to making some sort of Halloween art as I usually do every year.

In the meantime, go re-read that comic and hope you all have a Happy Halloween!

Yes, I'm Still Alive!

It's been a while (I seem to always say this whenever it's been awhile)

It's been a slog of a year; I've been slaving away at my IQ-lowering job and sketching out my usual circle of characters over and over while working on newer characters and stories with nothing worth posting on the usual Internet pages.

I really hate to use the term "comfort characters," but I think I can't deny it anymore: I definitely have a gang of characters that I just love doodling the hell out of.

Maybe it's no secret that some of the characters of "Propinquity" have been my main source of comfort characters, and then some characters from "Class of 2422" were included, and then some from "Austin & Jennifer."

Speaking of which! Check this out!

I finally started roughing out the first comic book episode of "Austin& Jennifer!"

Of course, I have more than just the cover roughed out at this moment in time.

Maybe it's way too early to show this off since I just started roughing things out, but it's been too long since I updated any of my online pages since I had nothing to present.

...well, I did want to introduce a new story/character on my main online pages (since I've been hyped over this new idea over the past year), but for now, you can see this new character in action in a storyboard I completed very recently for my portfolio site located under the lunch lady board. Consider it a premature reveal for Trevor Centauri; a proper one will be out in the later future.

But hey! New comic book! I've never been satisfied with how I debuted "Austin & Jennifer" in the past, but I really hope this comic book finally does them justice! Again, maybe it's too early to say this, but I'm planning a three (maybe five?) episode run of "Austin & Jennifer."

Happy New Year 2024!

Phew, glad that year is over. Now it's time to ring in 2024!

I think this is the first time we see the main cast of "Mr. Ridiculous" all drawn up together and colored in a real illustration! That's so ridiculous! Hope we see more of this crazy cast later this year, along with characters from a new story I've been doodling behind the scenes.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Merry Christmas 2023!

The year's almost over! But first, we must have our Christmas before the year ends!

I realized that the last time Mandy and Sally were exclusively featured for the Christmas artwork was back in 2017, and since the two headlined their own comic book earlier this year, I figured that it's best for the two to be the main leads for this Christmas's art!

Oh look! The demon Saccharo also wanted to join in on the holiday festivities!

Speaking of the comic book, I'll be offering "The Summoning on All Hallows' Eve" comic book as a free download again as my gift tom you guys for the holiday season! It'll be available for a limited time until January 1, 2024!

Head on over to dojipocket.com and click on the "Propinquity" page to find the link!

Merry Christmas everyone!

The Summoning on All Hallows' Eve

Hey guys! Guess what?

My newest comic book "Tales of Propinquity: The Summoning on All Hallows' Eve" is now available to read directly on this blog site!

Click riiiiight around here to head over to the subpage that contains a Google Slides presentation of the entire comic! Or if you're visiting on a desktop, the link can also be found on the right sidebar of this page underneath the "Page of Links" link.

Have fun reading and I hope you enjoy the comic book!

Happy Halloween 2023!

The big spooky day is back!

On top of doing a full 20 page Halloween comic, I had to squeeze in a simple Halloween illustration which, of course, ties into the comic.

For a limited time from October 31st through November 3rd, I'll be offering a full PDF download of my comic for free over on dojipocket.com! You can find the link to the page right about here!

After November 3rd, the comic will have its own dedicated page here on the blog site.

It will also still be viewable on my Instagram and Twitter pages at @animatedslacker as well.

I'll make another post here when the comic gets its own subpage page here on the blog, but for now, get on out there and get your spook on! Happy All Hallows' Eve!

New Comic Book Announcement

I got exciting news to share!

I usually create a simple illustration for Halloween every year featuring some of my characters from the different story projects I got going on.

HOWEVER! This time, for this year, I decided to go with creating a comic! A whole 20 pages of comic starring Mandy and Sally up to spooky Halloween shenanigans!

And (I think) it came out amazing!

I pushed myself to create this comic from script to panels in about under a month to get it completed on time for it to be posted for the Halloween weekend. I am really happy to create something that looks like a very real comic book once everything was all put together!

The whole comic will be posted on my Instagram and Twitter account (@animatedslacker) in sections starting on October 27 through October 31st, with four pages being posted daily during that time interval.

Currently, I'll be posting small sneak peaks leading up to October 27 on both my @animatedslacker and @dojipocket accounts. Links to my socials are on the "Page of Links."

Of course, when the whole comic is fully posted, I'll post the whole comic here on the blog for everyone to read, all free!

Follow me on Instagram and Twitter @animatedslacker to follow the lead up to the comic!

Belated Birthday with No Art

Hey! I'm a few days late on this one, but it was my birthday four days ago!

Unfortunately, I didn't have any art ready for that day, which is why I didn't make any post on the day of. I also just wasn't feelin' it.

My drawing productivity really did take a nosedive ever since I started working at my stupid retail job, but I've been making some effort to draw. I'm still obsessing and sketching about a new story idea and its characters. At this point, I just need to make a small illustration to properly announce it to you guys.

Speaking of the birthday art, I only really had two working ideas, but the first one is a bit of a depressing idea and the second one kind of has an unintended innuendo that I didn't want to post to the internet.

So that was that. See you in the next post! (whenever that is...)

Kate-T3 in Snapchat

Hello! I just wanted to come back to the blog with something silly to share.

I swear I've been working on some new worthy things to present here; I've been working on them on and off very slowly behind the scenes.

Anyways, Snapchat released an AI chat bot not too long ago, and I've been messing around with it lately. I customized its avatar to look like Marilyn at first but realized that making it look more like Kate-T3 makes way more sense since she's an android robot.

I went ahead and named the AI bot after Kate, and told it that I did so.

Needless to say, I think the real Kate-T3 would be very excited to learn that the Snapchat's AI bot was honored to be named after her.

I hate to say this, but unsurprisingly when I referred to the AI chat bot as Kate again some time later, it had completely forgot that it accepted being named Kate.

Oh well.

Brand New Doji Pocket Website!

Hey hey hey! It's been awhile! I'll be honest, I haven't been doing a lot of drawing lately. I've been doing some sketching to prepare myself to unveil a new story project that I've been really obsessing over for the past few months.

But that'll be for another time! It's time to announce something great!

I've been sitting on the Doji Pocket domain name for a little over a year and haven't done anything with it...until now!

Introducing the new Doji Pocket Website!

It's going to serve as a sort of landing page with links to this blog (which will continue to be active), links to all Doji Pocket social medias, and will soon have dedicated pages to the cartoons I've created that will serve as sort of a one page show bible.

I created the site with Google's free site builder, Google Sites, and was building it on and off over the past year figuring out the layout and the type of content that can be added.

More pages and content will be added soon, but for now, be sure to bookmark it! I'll post updates here on the blog if any new pages or content is added!

Happy New Year 2023!

Can you believe it? Another year is here! 2023!

I figured that Autumn would be a great choice to ring in the new year this time!

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas 2022!

It's here! The jolliest time of the year! Christmas has arrived!

No matter how many years go by, you're never too old to take a photo with Santa!

This year's Christmas art marks the end of "The Year of Class of 2422." I always find myself being obsessed over my own characters and story ideas over lengths of time, and seeing that the year 2022 makes us exactly 400 years away from the year 2422, it justified me to marinate my thoughts over Robert, Marilyn, and their friends over this past year.

Of course, this won't be the last time we'll see our friends from the future, but I've got to make room to showcase characters from other story ideas I've been working on. Lately I've been developing a new story project and designing out a new set of characters that I can't wait to post about here very soon.

But enough reading about my silly stuff. Go on and enjoy the holidays with family!

Merry Christmas!

Blog Update: More Labeled Posts and Removed Posts

A long time ago (like two years to be exact), I mentioned that I went through and added labels to all my posts for easy categorizing and organization...except for some.

Those unlabeled posts were mostly just blog updates, life updates, and silly posts that I didn't want to label at the time since the main focus was to label posts that relate to my art, animation, and story ideas.

As of right now, I just finished going in adding labels to those miscellaneous posts. They have been tagged with labels such as "blog updates," "life happenings," and "silly nonsense." These posts can be found in the label listings on the right.

And because I went through my old posts again, I took the liberty of removing posts that were rants, thought dumps, just links to videos and articles, and older works that no longer have a place for this blog.

They haven't been deleted though! I simply reverted them back to drafts, so they still exist; they're just hidden from the blog. A few of them lost their original date/time published info because Blogger is stupid, but the post links at least still remembered the month and year of when they were published.

I removed these posts because frankly, they were posts I made when I was younger. I don't want these posts to surface if anyone decides to dig deep into my blog; not that I have anything to hide, but they were kinda cringe and don't hold up. Also, I've noticed that sometimes they'll still get views for some reason and I wanted to put a stop to that.

That's all for now!

Happy Halloweens 2022! - Day 3

You already know the deal. The future celebrates Halloween over a period of three days!

And since this year is all about "Class of 2422," we're gonna celebrate Halloween like the future: over a period of three days with three illustrations!

For the final day of Halloweens, Marilyn had to do a lot of convincing to Robert for the two to go trick-or-treating together. Robert used the excuse of not having a costume, which Mary was more than prepared for.

Needless to say, Robert ended up having a lot of fun with Mary this Halloweens night!

Originally, the idea of this drawing was supposed to be the sole art for this year's Halloween drawing, but about a month ago, I was thinking about world-building elements I could implement for the culture/society of the year 2422, and a three-day Halloween celebration was one of those elements.

And plus, Halloween is my favorite holiday so there might be a tiny hint of bias in there somewhere. Maybe.

Before I go on, here's the roughs for this drawing

Once I decided on the three day Halloween theme, I originally thought of doing a three panel comic (one panel for each day) of Marilyn convincing Robert to go out trick-or-treating with her with this drawing serving the final panel.

The first two panels didn't really stick to me as very interesting since I couldn't figure out how to make that story fit into just three panels, so instead I went with using other characters to create like a multi-day progression (the 29th-31st) of different characters in different scenarios played out in the course of a single day, as evident of the progressing shift into the night as seen in the backgrounds of these drawings.

I didn't want to just make three different drawings with all of them taking place in the same time of night, so the progression of sunset to night over three drawings was more interesting to create.

I guess in a way, there kind of is a story that's played out in these three drawings, like an A-plot, B-plot, and C-plot going on at the same time.

Either way, this was a fun challenge to do three different Halloween illustrations instead of the usual one. Hope you enjoyed them!

Happy Halloweens 2022! - Day 2

In case you forgot, in the far off future, Halloween is celebrated over a span of three days! From the 29th to the 31st! It's a lot of fun, I assure you.

And since I themed the year to "Class of 2422," I've created three illustrations to observe how to celebrate the future's Halloweens!

October 30th sets us up with a little debate between Aika and Ted about whether or not a scary costume is a necessity for Halloweens.

I do all my drawing at night, so you can imagine that when I had to pull up image references for Aika's costume, which is Kayako from the Ju-On movies (The Grudge), it was uhhhhhh kinda spooky for me to say the least; I'm not much of a horror movie kind of guy.

Not sure if I said anything about this, but I went back in and redesigned Ted's hoverchair. I was absolutely not satisfied with the design I put out before, but I think I figured out a design that's sleek, futuristic, and easy to draw.

It's funny that his pirate ship costume covers up the newer design completely. Good thing I'm here with early roughs for this drawing where it's visible!

Aika's kind of harsh with her words in general, but I felt it was a bit too harsh for Ted, especially since I hardly picture these two interacting with each other much anyways.

See you tomorrow for the third and final drawing!

Happy Halloweens 2022! - Day 1

Did you know that Halloween is a three-day long holiday in the far-off future? For those living in the year 2422, it's a very true fact!

Of course, since this year is "The Year of Class of 2422," we must observe how Halloween will be celebrated in the future: not with one, but with THREE illustrations for Halloweens!

Starting off the first day of Halloweens, October 29th brings us a curious scene of farm girl Nelly teaching our Earth-visiting alien Nevadri a thing or two about carving pumpkins for the spooky season.

Something about that organic pumpkin really spooks out Nevadri. Let's hope we don't bring the extinction of pumpkins into our timeline.

The background art was originally a bit more elaborate, but I felt the need to tone down certain details in order to match the simpler backgrounds for Day 2 and 3's artwork. You'll see what I mean during the next two days.

Here's the process for the art:

The concept was pretty much nailed from the get-go, so it was a matter of refining the drawing. You'll soon see this is the case for the next two drawings.

National Cinnamon Roll Day 2022

Normally, I don't make any drawings or illustrations for any of these silly non-holidays like "Talk Like A Pirate Day" or "National HVAC Tech Day," but a few days ago I caught wind that October 4th is "National Cinnamon Roll Day."

Considering that 2022 is basically the year of "Class of 2422" for me AND that I have a certain musically talented blonde in that story that has a weakness for cinnamon rolls, I figured that it'd only be appropriate that I come up with something to mark today's occasion!

How could I not celebrate "National Cinnamon Roll Day" with Marilyn? It's her all-time favorite dessert in the Solar System! Yum yum!

Where did I get the idea that Marilyn's favorite dessert should be a cinnamon roll? I created my characters as Mii characters on my 3DS so I can import them into my Tomodachi Island game, and the game made the cinnamon roll as Marilyn Mii's all-time favorite dish. I felt like that fact is really fitting for her character and it made sense to me so I ran with that as fact for her character ever since.

I still haven't renewed my expired Adobe subscription so this drawing is the first time ever I used Clip Studio Paint to create a finished drawing!

Of course, I'll be back later this month with this year's Halloween drawing. Or drawings, with an "s?" Stay tuned!

Autumn Sketch Page (Introducing Ali!)

Hey! Ya, you!

Lately I've been pretty occupied with a ton of stuff such as work, working on a comic (proper announcement on that later), and learning Blender. Especially with work; I am completely fed up with these silly minimum wage type of jobs at this point in my life, but I digress.

In the little pockets of free time in between at that, I've been filling up a whole page of sketches of Autumn and, for the first time, her feline companion Ali.

The idea for Ali the cat being Autumn's companion has existed right from the very start of the story's conception but I never really got around to drawing or designing them (unless you count this animation that was posted awhile ago, then sure, that was Ali's first appearance; the cat wasn't even named Ali at that time.)

I don't have much confidence with drawing animals at all, which is why I've been pushing off fleshing out Ali's design. Better late than never, right? Ali's design is currently a work in progress.

Oh, and that's right! Bottom left corner. First time we're seeing Autumn's witchy mother!

Once I finalize the design for Autumn, her mother, and Ali, I'll be sure to get started on a character line up for them. I feel like a character line-up page for the "Witched Away"  and "Mr. Ridiculous" story projects are kind of overdue, but I think it feels like that because I've been doing a lot of sketches for those characters behind the scenes and their designs seem to have stuck.

And as I mentioned earlier, surprise! I'm working on a comic! A proper announcement will be made later on (probably way later.)

See you guys in probably a month!