Good morning party people!
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve been able to do any work on the 2025 Restructure, but I haven’t been idle.

For the most part I’ve been trying to get in the swing of things with this new schedule I’m working on for myself, get posts automated, figure out commissions and, as always, grind for new commissions so I can meet rent.
I’ve been fairly busy, all around, and was hardly able to work this past weekend because I traveled out of town for the first time in around 10 years; It was my little Niece’s one-year birthday, and my brother was dead set on having me.

I sent out direct messages to everyone at the start of this month giving them an “iron-clad” timeline on the sketches for their commissions that was, unfortunately, derailed by all of those things, but as of returning to town yesterday and getting my room and workspace cleaned and reorganized, I am finally at a point where nothing should be getting in my way with any of that.
I do have a couple pieces I need to FINISH before I can pound through those sketches, but once I finish writing this post, I’m jumping on my Discord stream to start pounding those works out, and I’ll be going until I drop!

I have a lot of small exciting things I’m planning coming up, now that the 2025 Restructure is finally at a workable place where the remaining goals for it aren’t REQUIRED for me to be able to work, and I’ve been automating a lot of posts to keep myself relevant in the various algorithms.

Commission Updates

My current Commission Queue is 22 names long, and while some of those names have 2-3 commissions, my intent is to do all of the rough sketches within the next week, and then work on completing at least 10 names per month to get myself back on track with everything.

I don’t like how much I’ve been promising to get things done and then everything slips out of my fingers this last year because of how much I’ve been juggling, so I want to temper expectations a bit. I INTEND to finish the sketches in the next week and do 10 names per month after that; However with how things have been going I can’t be sure that I’ll be able to do that.
At the moment, I feel like the only thing that will get in my way is the upcoming rent- as usual this time of the month- but unlike the last few months I don’t have 40,000 things I need to do with my website and portfolio.

I will be scheduling new posts featuring my 2025 portfolio works to go live intermittently so that my Facebook Page starts finally getting up to date with everything, and drawing- and that’s basically all of my responsibilities this week.
For the posts, I’m planning to slap 10 new posts into a queue, to post once per day- 10 posts should only take me around an hour or so to draft (at most), leaving me the entire rest of the day to slap myself onto my stream and get drawing.

I’m excited to finally be at a point where it feels like I don’t have a mountain of stuff between me and commissions, again, and it’s the first time I’ve felt like that in around 2 years, so I’m hoping my focus is able to keep up with things and I don’t realize there was some small stupid thing that I missed that ends up taking me days to get done- but I feel like I’ve been super thorough with everything to make sure that wouldn’t happen.

Anyway, apologies to those of you still waiting, and even moreso due to the fact that I’ve promised to get started multiple times the last month and have failed to be able to. As usual, I appreciate your patience and I’ll be posting WIPs in my Commission Updates channel on Discord.

“Newsletter” update:
Something Strange – A Digital Art Zine Presented by Ash Something

The “Paid Newsletter” here has been up in the air for awhile, and I’ve been wanting to put the time and energy into providing it for awhile now. Unfortunately that’s been next to impossible to do with everything else that’s been on my plate, and because of that I’m still very much only in the planning phases.

As some of you may know, I had already decided to do an art zine, and decided on the title Something Strange. I had the loose idea to draw inspiration from Heavy Metal Magazine for the newsletter- which has been kind of derailed by Heavy Metal coming back into action over the last 6 months or so- but that hasn’t stopped my momentum: Only made me have to reconsider some of the artistic direction I was gonna take.

Anyway, all of that said, over the last month I HAVE been making a lot of motion on the planning phases and brainstorming, and I’ve finally started to have a clear idea of the direction I want to take it in.
I’m going to need to make a couple drafts of the newsletter to figure out the amount of time each one will take, so I can figure out what a feasible schedule for the newsletter will be: At the moment I believe it will be done monthly but if things go well I can do it every 2 weeks- if it turns out I’m biting off more than I realize though, it may end up being every two months. That’s the part of it all that’s the most up-in-the-air currently.

I won’t get into all the details just yet, as I’m starting to feel like it’s better to have something tangible to show before telling everyone my plans, but I have a massive to-do list put together for the zine and I’m planning to do my work on the zine every Sunday starting this weekend. The first steps are going to be putting together a page template for the zine so that I can plug art and graphics into it as they become ready, and the template will be around a 10-15 page magazine format, that I’ll eventually be able to print as hard copies.

Some Confirmed Segments of the Zine:

1. Cover Page – This will feature a new high detail illustration for each issue showcasing one of my OCs.
2. Strange Company – My long-awaited webcomic Strange Company, a 4-koma/newspaper style comic will be published in the zine. I currently have to draft the initial per-page scripts but that’s one of the first things on my to-do list for the zine.
3. Funhouse Mirrors – With three pages already published separately, I’ll be restarting this comic with issue 1 of Something Strange.
4. Character Spotlight – I have a wide range of my own original characters and I have been compiling them into a set of “Stock Characters” for me to use in the zine as if they were an ensemble of actors, so that I can start making an anthology comic using them all. At the moment, though, the only plan for them is to do a Character Spotlight where I show the character off and provide info about the character themselves outside of their roles in the anthology.
5. Artist Spotlight: Historical – This segment will feature the art and a small bio of an artist I’ve chosen, most likely from within the last century or so, but likely reaching back to or before the renaissance- and it may instead include info about regional/cultural works not attributed to specific artists, or whose artists are unknown because of how old the cultures are.
6. Artist Spotlight: Artists of Today – This segment will feature a new small/independent artist that I know along with a full page spread of one of my favorite works of theirs. I will allow submissions for this segment eventually, however for the first few I will be putting the spotlight together myself.
7. Ash Something’s How-To: Tutorial Hour – This segment will feature a different tutorial on how to do a different artistic technique or anatomical piece every issue.

There are other segments that I may decide to add to the zine later, but at the moment these are the pieces that I’ve decided are must-haves, and each one has already had a good deal of planning put into them, so the next stages are to finish up the written brainstorming, lock the zine template in, and start drawing the content needed for each segment.

Tarot Updates: Lokean Runecards and Lokabrenna Tarot

I know it probably seems like these projects are slow going, but just like the Zine, I’ve been putting a lot of back-end work in on them.
At the moment I will not be doing any further sketch or drawing work on them for a couple months, as I HAVE to get these commissions finished: Some of them have been waiting a full year now, and that’s unacceptable. I know the clients are chill about it and have been happy just getting updates, but the longer I make people wait to get their art the more I hate myself so I have to make commissions my top priority currently.
However, once the commission queue is handled, the tarot projects will begin being worked out in further detail starting with finishing the Rune Card set for Three Little Sisters Publishing.

Once I have the brunt of these commissions finished I intend to put all of my focus into the Zine and the Tarot projects, to really start making headway on them. That said; Over the last month I have worked out some of the sketches or the Lokabrenna tarot along with a fairly detailed plan for each card I’ll have in it, what the suits will be, and how it will differ from traditional tarot decks (as I plan to create a full rulebook and detailed meanings behind each card so that the deck can be used both as traditional tarot or in the Lokabrenna-Specific model I plan to make).
Going will still be slow, especially while the Runecard set is still pending, but you’ll be able to expect real updates to the Lokabrenna deck, starting with revised art for the first two cards, starting around the first or second week of August.

Other Updates:

At the moment there really aren’t any other updates. Most of the other stuff I would have to talk about are more specific to the 2025 Restructure, which as I’ve said, I haven’t really been able to work on this month: I’ve had to put the next steps of the restructure on hold, also, while I make commission work my top priority.

That being said, there shouldn’t be many more updates in the 2025 restructure as a whole. I’m currently recording most of my art processes as I draw, so that I can create new video content, and working on scripts so I can get some really ORIGINAL videos made on my official channels, and I’ll need to put some effort into those coming up soon, but for now I’m just gonna let myself record everything and get into the habit of that while focusing on the art itself instead of worrying about how I’m going to post it or what I’m going to say- which will also help me develop a backlog of content that I can use moving forward once this set of commissions is handled.

With all that, I’m gonna leave you all to your devices.
Commissions are open and I’ll be adding any commissions I get before July 1 into my CURRENT queue to finish with the 22 names I mentioned above, so please make sure to get your orders in ASAP if you don’t want to have a longer wait time!

I want to once again thank you for your continued support, and I look forward to everything we create together!