october-november 2025 updates: many color illustrations, shop sale, phrase 3 work, youtube channel prep
Happy December! October was busy, so I admittedly didn’t allocate enough time to making a blog post 😅 Which means this is a long one! October and November’s main milestones were…
Halloween color illustrations
DTIYS entry
Art sale for Black Friday and Small Business Saturday
Phrase 3 progress
YouTube channel preparations (it’s finally time to talk about this!)
Vampire Nell 🤍
View on Instagram. This started out as a warm-up doodle before comic work, but I wound up doing a full render since portraits are pretty quick to complete.
Romantasy Nao and Isa 💖
View on Instagram. Day and Night versions because I couldn’t choose! They would have loooved if their story was in this genre, but alas… Cargo Pants™
The Junior Punks as the Saja Boys (lol)
View on Instagram. I think it’s become a tradition to draw them in a group costume for Halloween 👻 The character descriptions were a lot of fun to put together!
CatPunk1300 DTIYS Entry
View on Instagram. I loved the pose and concept of the original character, so I knew I had to join this event!
Art Sale for Black Friday and Small Business Saturday
At the time of publishing this post, the sale is still ongoing :) It wraps up on Saturday, December 6 11:59 PM PST. The perks of this sale were:
15% off site-wide
free shipping on all orders $30 USD+
I’ll share packing photos and some of the marketing material in the December blog post, as the sale will be over by that point. For now, here is a pic of some bookmarks-in-progress from yesterday (11/30)! I am still not over the new backside logos 🥹💖
Phrase 3 Progress
October was a mix of comic work with Halloween-themed color illustrations. Meanwhile, November was primarily comic work and oooof I mostly worked on hard-hitters. I’m starting December with some PTO from work, so I can stamp out more progress and possibly get the next episode ready for release in the next weeks.
One of my favorite things to happen in Phrase 3: We see the first title card!
Rambling About Time Management and Goals for Next Year (a more in-depth discussion of goal reflection + upcoming goals will be in a later, separate post)
Now that it’s December, it’s been 8 months since the last webtoon update. Building up my portfolio with stronger color illustrations and getting my shop running at a certain point of function were both equally important goals for this year, so I don’t regret allocating my creative time to those efforts… However, now that we’re close to moving past Punks’ first year of publishing, I’ve been reflecting on how my journey and day-to-day need to change for the sake of the series.
I’m already starting to make certain changes in my personal life, but for now, I will just discuss the creative “sacrifices” that I plan on making for next year, in order to prioritize the comic.
Less color illustrations | I often have the itch to do at least one a month, but each one can take up to a week’s worth of time, sometimes even more depending on its complexity.
Closing commissions | And if it’s a surprise that I even take them, then that’s understandable because I don’t normally advertise them in the first place lol. I actually planned on openly advertising them next year, but I do not believe I’ll have the bandwidth.
Saying no to more events | It admittedly pains me to list this one because I’ve already said no to collabs and events that I wanted to be a part of this year. But similar to the previous two points, my goal is to maximize how much of my creative time is placed into the comic.
So TLDR: If it’s not art directly for the comic, then I’m probably not going to create it. My only foreseen exceptions will be my annual Lunar New Year illustration (as it’s a tradition I want to uphold) and a “Meet the Artist” artwork at some point because I’ve always wanted to do one lol
Note that I put the word “sacrifice” in quotes. That is because, while I’d love to keep these things on my plate, my love for my comic and for bringing it to life will make this all worth it, and I already know that :) Also note that nothing regarding the shop is going to be “sacrificed”, as I want to continue to scale that project as well (though perhaps not as much as I do the comic moving forward!).
I seldom discuss my life outside of art 1) as a personal boundary and 2) because we all have things going on; I’m not special in this regard. But I will admit now, that sometimes certain personal obligations take all my free time for the week, and those obligations will always come first for me. Ultimately, there is only so much time in the day, and only so much of that time can be allocated to my creative work.
I’m trying to stay direct in how I talk about this, but I want to emphasize that I am more than happy to “lock in” for this story. It’s my dream to put it out there, and so I’m going to make it come true 💖
YouTube Channel Preparations
I’ll keep this short and just say that for now, the channel will simply be the reposting of old IG reels :) I do eventually want to make actual studio vlogs, but to continue the sentiments of the above rambling, I don’t want to spread myself too thin. The current preparations have been:
Installed a video editing software on my PC
Made a video title card graphic (I’ve been repurposing it for social media and my shop too— it’s the background graphic for the Black Friday sale announcement!)
Configured a posting schedule for Shorts
I’ll start posting in mid-January!
Looking ahead…
Goals for December include:
Phrase 3 work
See you in the next update!
