With the Christmas break finally over, and with my Bachelor’s now pulled from the brink of disaster, I and the ryka are finally ready to start into a new year. Let’s get this show on the road!

And it looks like we’re starting off the year with a good old reconciliation session. Despite her general doomer attitude, it seems like Avie still has at least one of her hearts beating in that cold, lifeless, virtualized chest of hers. Also, Fris claims to have a plan to get both of them out of this mess, so there’s hope to be had. However, with his more recent track record of mishaps, I don’t think we should be too optimistic just yet…

Website-Exclusive Author’s Note:

This page exists. It’s neither great, nor especially horrible. I could claim that it’s the best page I’ve drawn so far, but given my artistic journey up to this point, that’s kind of a given. Seriously, I’ve been looking at the earlier pages recently, by GOD are those ugly. I sure was brave to put them out there…

Yeah, I guess that’s one avenue for optimism in these difficult times: My art has undeniably improved across the recent months. And in that sense, this page also offers its own small set of improvements and firsts:

First of all: Low-angle shots. They didn’t turn out quite as well as I’d have liked them to, and I’ve already identified several things I can improve on and practice anatomy wise going forwards. However, all in all, I’m proud to have finally pushed myself towards doing the more dynamic poses I’d promised to incorporate into the story some time back.

Also: Eye sockets and more dynamic hair. I’m now finally beginning to map out the planes of the rykani face, and that has also given me the opportunity to finally make sense of the shapes and forms I’ve been drawing these last few pages. For some reason, I never quite noticed that Fris’s hair-Plocculli were both weirdly flat and also didn’t make much sense to begin with. This page includes my first attempts at fixing the rykani facial anatomy, but there’s quite a lot of work to be done yet.

I’ll really try to get back into my artistic practices over the coming weeks and months, and the start of Ask a Ryka will help with that a lot. Once I’m back in the swing of things, and once my art has finally improved to a point where I don’t have to spend days at a time fixing the non-Euclidean anatomy of my characters, I’ll also try and do weekly comic uploads.

So, in more ways than one, good things are coming up. There’s a great cause of optimism from my side, and I hope that all the effort I’ve put into this thing will start paying off this year. Only time will tell, but for the first time in a good while, I’ve got my head held high.