Thanks to everyone who has participated in my Tumblr reblog contest so far! You can still enter your handle in the hat until Friday, February 8th at midnight CST. Just reblog this Tumblr post advertising the four digital prints I’ve added to my store to raise money to get to my table at TCAF. I will randomly select one person and mail them a 6×9″ ink drawing of the Miizzzard on smooth watercolor paper.

I don’t know about y’all, but my muse is fickle. Whenever I have work to do (right now, Fuel Quest, Vortex #4, and some freelance web development projects), I always get super stoked by the idea of a side project that’ll just derail me. Lately I’ve been reading about pixel art and game development, dreaming about making some small adventure games set in the Hyperverse. I’m contemplating how to best harness this excitement while still keeping my momentum on my current projects going. I think I might institute something similar to Google’s 20% time – give myself a couple of hours each week to work on whatever I want while reserving the remainder of my studio time for my main projects. How do y’all balance having fun with new projects and previous commitments?

The reason I’m bringing this up is because I spent far too much time this past weekend making a small pixel art animation of the Miizzzard walking:

I followed Derek Yu’s very helpful tutorial on making sprites. I liked how this let me scratch my desire to make a GIF without all the effort of more traditional animation. Also I get to indulge the perfectionist part of my brain that agonizes over the placement of every pixel.