Plans For 2022

2021 was a long year for me, but I'm happy to say that art-wise, it was my all time most productive one. Excluding any alt. variants, I finished about 60 new pictures and a 2-page comic with 19 panels of material. I've never made this much digital art before in my life, and I'm grateful to everyone who's been there to see it, even in passing. So now with that behind us, I want to be upfront with what I hope to accomplish in 2022. With my new job taking up so much time and energy, I still have to figure out whether or not a new posting schedule will be possible. But beyond that, there are four major steps I want to take this year.

First, I'm going to rebrand a little by changing my artist title. "Darthmaul1999" was a throwaway name I came up with when I was around 13, and I feel like it ran its course a long time ago. So now I want to change it to something better. After some brainstorming and consulting some friends, I think I've settled on "Alpha Rain" for my new name. It comes from a mix of the album title "Alpha" and the song title "Who Will Stop the Rain", both by the band Asia. Not only do I think it sounds cooler and more unique, but I always enjoy tributing my favorite music like that. I'll wait about a week to give people time to see this, and after that, the "Darthmaul1999" name will finally get its long overdue retirement.

Second, I want to make another big comic, this time longer than 2 pages. I want it to feature Rudolph and Clarice getting hot and heavy together, so it'll probably be finished for Christmas later this year. But don't think you'll have to wait until December to start seeing it, because the last comic was my first glimpse into just how much time and planning they can really require. The sketches alone will probably have to be done 6 months in advance, to say nothing of the time that lineart, coloring and shading could take. I expect it to be maybe 10-ish pages right now, though that could always change. It's a daunting task for me, but as long as I give myself enough time, I'm ready and willing to give my audience the best I can possibly do.

Third, I want to experiment more with expressiveness and fluidity in this year's art. It's slowly been dawning on me just how same-y and bland I draw a lot of characters' facial expressions, and how I unintentionally make their body language look too stiff and rigid. Part of this is because anatomy has never been my strong suit, so I always feel nervous to deviate too far from what I think are accurate to strictly real life proportions. But I think this is also one of the big things holding me back from reaching more people. Compared to all the other amazing art I see on Twitter every day, mine just doesn't stand out much. So I'm gonna work harder on fixing that this year, with extra focus on color and framing improvement too. Hopefully, I can figure out how to improve my craft enough to reach where I want to be this year.

Fourth and finally, I want to start rolling out some more pictures of OCs in action. If I'm going to make a living off my art someday, I can't just keep drawing copyrighted characters forever. I need more of an artistic identity by creating my own furry creatures, so that's what I'm gonna do. I did previously make a whole cast of OCs in 2020, like Magdalene, Lomok, Gloria, etc. But I no longer want to use them for porn like I did when I first made them, so now I think a clean slate is in order. I'll be doing my best to design and write up a new batch of characters, kept specifically into the sexy stuff this time. Stay tuned to see them be introduced. And for those of you who like the porn of copyrighted characters, don't worry, I'll still be making plenty of that going forward. God only knows there's never enough saucy pics of Lady or Cosmo out there. But it's not *all* I wanna do, so I'm just looking forward to mixing it up more.

With all that said, have a happy new year everybody! I'm excited to see where things go in 2022, and once again, I appreciate each and every person who gave my work the time of day. I hope I can make y'all proud!

-Alpha Rain