Yay! Now that I'm home from work I can share some of my prep work.
Here's my rough sketches for my episode:
I work with vector layers in Manga Studio/Clip Paint. I like vector layers because I'm able to control and manipulate line weights, curves, and I can clean up sketches like these really quickly with the eraser tool that works special with vector layers in manga studio.
@joannekwan and I worked together on a premise to connect our two episodes together. Thank you so much for letting me kidnap Padda for my episode X3 ♥ It was such a pleasure to work together on this.
My original card design was super ambitious and I wanted to try and fit EVERYONE participating this year into it. lol
This turned out to be A LOT more work than I felt comfortable taking on and as the collab progressed a few artists came and went so it wouldn't of been accurate come posting day. So I skipped it for a simpler crayon drawing of Oops and Plague.
I kept the coloring and backgrounds very simple as well. BGs and coloring isn't my strength. Jeramy does all the backgrounds in the Oops series but he refused to do backgrounds this year saying that what I had looked good OAO! Great to know, but they weren't meant to be final backgrounds lol
The colors and the Winter Fest BGs were all based on last year's Winter Fest. I mostly looked at @noxfox and @AnnaLandin's episode from last year to rough out a slight resemblance. I have Nox's watch tower and Anna's Yule Goat in there. X3
Also all the crayon drawings from Oops are based on actual scenes from the previous years. I even included @ratique's scene of Grave fling a cake in the drawing in Plague's hand on the first page, plus a Grassblades and Fangtooth cameo.
I also included cameos of Boulder and Fleet, {Psycho Babble], Ichabod, AB ZEEK, Yuu, and a very muppet looking Kao lol
The cameos in the Winter Fest are a bit hard to see since they're in the WAY background. There's Kayke's Creep, Vincent, Cici's little demon guy, Ichabod, Kari, Dirge, Skye, KISMET, AB ZEEK, J-man, Shiori Saki, and Boulder & Fleet.
This year's collab has been very ambitious. Big shout out and thanks to the artists participating this year (trying not to spoil reveals of artists left to post). It's super humbling to see so much talent go into this event, each episode has it own heart and merit in it. ♥
Each year it's never known if there's going to be a collab taking place, until just one day out of the blue a group of us decide to do something crazy again. haha I honestly thought last year would be my last holiday collab. With such a cute clever idea for this year, I was convinced back into it for another go.
For my episode, I wanted to sort of give a heartfelt remembrance to the past collabs while also giving a bit of a book end to this year's collab. I'm not sure if I'll be doing another one next year. I think I might need a break ^_^ I have no idea what next year will bring but if this were to be my last holiday collab episode I could be happy with it.
I also want to give a thanks and shout out to @marfivemai and Cup of Snark, they layout out most of the framework for this year's event. The postcard theme, cross-promoting each other, helping to invite artists and organizing the whole event was through their great efforts. Thank you!
And of course a big thanks to the Tapastic Staff for helping to promote our collab event and encouraging our crazy ambitious idea of doubling the artists participating to 54 artists.
Going to share this quote line from Michael after I showed him this year's line-up: