As every year, I like to highlight some of my favorite moments of the past year. Especially in a year with so much bleh, it’s nice to look back on the good times.
Continue reading “Experience Log 2020”Hedgefield Quarterly Review 2020.the-rest-of-it
Hello there, nice to see you again. I was going to write one of these each quarter, wasn’t I? Well, it’s been a weird year. I hope you’re all doing okay out there.
It’s been 9 months since I started working exclusively from home. In the beginning I loved it, then I hated it for a bit, now I generally enjoy it. I built a really nice home office, but, I don’t think it’s been my most productive period. Not because of working from home, but mostly I’m missing people. People to bounce ideas off of, laugh with, motivate me, and experience new things with. I’m super thankful I have a great wife here with me or I’d probably go a bit mental, but I definitely don’t feel as inspired as I normally would. I didn’t expect that to be such a thing, but here we are.
Still, I did things:
Continue reading “Hedgefield Quarterly Review 2020.the-rest-of-it”Het regent
Off-Stage is back on stage
Some of you may remember my webcomic about music and life in Amsterdam, Off-Stage. I worked on it during the twilight years of the traditional webcomics model, where you have a website and post pages each week and maybe earn something from merch and book sales (I never got to that point). It didn’t feel like the right format for that story anymore, but I wasn’t sure what was.
Fast-forward a few years, and we’re in a new era. Comics exist on social media now, and in a way that makes sense for our mobile-first world. Pages get chopped up into panels that fit the portrait-orientation screen of a smartphone. Platforms like Tapas and Webtoons are bringing a whole new generation of comics to readers.
So this week I re-launched Off-Stage on Webtoons! It’s a full remaster at a higher, crisper resolution, optimized for a vertical scroll.
I was not looking forward to having to chop up all the existing pages, but I must say the process was fairly quick, and it is opening up so many possiblities to write more naturally, now that the length of an update doesn’t matter anymore. Once I get to the point where I can start making new material, I’m sure that will feel great. For now I’m busy reworking all the existing pages and posting them week by week.
Head on over to Webtoons and subscribe to stay informed!
Six fanarts
I put the question out on my Instagram which characters I should draw for the #sixfanarts challenge, and here they are:
It was a lot of fun to work on these, and I still have some good suggestions laying around, so I might do another one. Got more suggestions? Drop ’em in the comments!
Hedgefield Quarterly Review 2020.1
Hello and welcome, to the first Hedgefield Quarterly Review.
As the name implies, this will be a place for me to take stock of what I’ve accomplished in the past three months, and share it with you. It’s a nice middle road between a handful of tweets, and a yearly review, which I tried to do last year but resulted in an OVERWHELMING Google Doc that I haven’t dared look at since. The plan is to write these as a bookend to the close of each financial quarter, a good a time as any to look back and see whether I made any duckets (or not).
Continue reading “Hedgefield Quarterly Review 2020.1”My favorite Yoast illustrations
When I started working at Yoast, making new illustrations for each blog post was still a thing. We’ve scaled that back now to spend more time on the products, but in those first few years Erwin and me drew quite a few of them. Now that we’re all quarantined working from home, we decided to let everyone pick out one to print and hang on their home office wall. Looking back through the archive, I came across a lot of good ones again that I had forgotten about.
So these are, in no particular order, my favorites from the 150+ ones I drew.
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A foggy beach
Figured I’d try my hand at a #drawthisinyourstylechallenge, this one set out by the wonderful @izzyburtonart. I tweaked it to look like my wife and our dog, set against the cliffs of Scotland, which we visited last year. Indeed, not a lot of things can beat a foggy beach.
Never out of style
Alina
Picked up the iPad again to do some sketching. I might color this one later. I like doing brightly colored drawings, but the elegant simplicity of a sketch often convinces me to stop there.
