#there will be a lot more concept art and character refs here than usual | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

beebrainedstudios · 2 years

Photo

The Pack (White Wolves of London- Victor Dane AU)

(Individual refs + details below the cut!)

Finally, I’m done with this illustration! I have been working on and off on this for a month or two now as I’ve been writing the Victor Dane AU (First chapter found here!); for everyone unaware, it’s a Vicious AU where the series takes place in the ADSOM universe, specifically in and around White London. These four are known as the Pack and are Victor’s closest allies (although two members are missing here- you’ll see them later). I’ve been having a lot of fun with the AU, but I wanted to have at least a rough idea of what everyone looked like, so this is concept art of sorts where I mostly solidified the designs from one of the AU’s arcs. It’s also my first time drawing Mitch and Dominic, and I’m very pleased with how they came out, especially Dominic and his grumpy expression. Anyways, individual pictures are below the cut, alongside a few facts about each character’s role in the AU and some of the details in their designs.

Mitch:

- Mitch Turner is also known as the Raven (and later, the King’s Right Hand). Wickedly smart, surprisingly moral, and very very big, he’s been Victor’s closest ally every since the latter was thrown into prison following a deadly magical experiment. Mitch was worried his unusually bad luck would end up getting the ex-prince killed and tried to look out for him, but just as in canon, Victor proved to be perfectly capable of protecting himself on his own. A tentative friendship grew, and Mitch followed Victor into exile, crime, and eventually politics. No matter where the pair have ended up, Mitch has always been happy to help Victor maintain control of his subordinates by both providing extra muscle and acting as a mediator when things get too heated. He’s usually the one who does most of the actual ruling since Victor is often distracted by external threats to his territory/kingdom; Mitch typically keeps things running while Victor goes to deal with the threats. He also does an excellent job of caring for the rest of the Pack as they steadily join the group, first with Victor’s cousins (the members missing from the picture here), then Sydney, then Dominic.

- Design-wise, this is how I usually imagine Mitch, just in fantasy clothes since this is his ADSOM design. He’s a little duller than usual due to coming from the White World, but he’s still one of the more colorful members of the Pack. He has a lot of scars and a lot of tattoos under all of those clothes, but since the kingdom of Merit is north of White London, its usually too cold for anything less then three warm layers. His design also has a lot of conventions that are shared with the rest of the Pack shown here, such as the gold wolves’ teeth (a sign that they are close allies of the Wolf King), and the pointed triangle-stripe motif you can see on his shoulders and coat; this is known as a “hound’s fangs” pattern and is specific to the kingdom of Merit where Mitch and the rest of the group are from.

- Unlike a lot of the cast of the AU, Mitch has no magic. He’s not a Blackhearted (basically a magic EO) or a mage, but he doesn’t need any magic since he’s plenty strong on his own. Instead, his preferred weapons are his brain, his fists, a set of studded gloves that are essentially brass knuckles, and various other pieces of armor that allow him to put his strength to good use.

Dominic:

- In this AU, Dominic is a very grouchy Antari who spends most of his time before meeting Victor running away from things. His entire life has been nothing but people hunting him down to kill him, enslave him, or drink his blood, and that has left him with a whole lot of emotional issues and lots of chronic pain from all of the injuries he’s received. His history has a lot in common with Holland’s actually, but where Holland had periods of time where he felt safe, Dominic had very little security after his eye went dark. However, after Victor rescues him from a deadly enemy, Dominic is surprised to find one king who wants to establish a mutual partnership instead of ownership (Victor knows better than to pick a fight with a skittish Antari), and he eventually allies himself with him so he can have a few other people watching his back, earning him the title of the King’s Shadow and the Fox. It certainly doesn’t hurt either that the agreement comes with help for his chronic pain. Over time, Dominic warms up to the Pack and becomes one of Victor’s most loyal supporters, helping him spy on enemies, and if need be, dispose of them before they cause any problems. He also looks after Sydney if no one else is around, and between him and Dol she’s one of the safest people in Merit.

- Design-wise, Dominic has a few things in common with Mitch, such as the White-world desaturation, the “hound’s fang” patterns, and the gold teeth decoration. However, where Mitch’s symbolic fangs are on the hood of his coat and his belt buckle, Dominic’s are threaded into his coat at the shoulders. He also has a golden fang ring that he uses to draw blood for spells like Holland does in ADSOM. I’m pretty pleased with how beat-up I managed to make him look; his hair is gray from stress, and he is by far the most scarred member of the Pack due to his history. He also has terrible posture and likes to slouch- when he’s not, he’s taller than Victor and nearly as tall as Mitch.

- Being an Antari, Dominic has the ability to use a lot of magic; though he’s initially fairly weak due to his condition, he recovers after joining the Pack and becomes one of its strongest members. While he’s most comfortable with using travel spells, he’s also a powerful fighter who’s very adept at using magic to alter the battlefield to give him an advantage, such as summoning shadows to blind the opponent or ice to trip them up. He usually wields several long knives, but he’s perfectly happy to petrify or freeze people too if need be- he’s more of a magician than a weapons specialist.

Sydney and Dol:

- Sydney is one of the youngest members of Victor’s court and certainly the youngest member of the Pack, but regardless of her age, she has a lot of influence from having Mitch, Victor, and Dominic all wrapped around her fingers. She was rescued from the same threat that nearly killed Dominic, and after Victor found her she never really left, instead cementing herself as a useful ally and friend to the group. She’s essentially their second chance; if a party member dies, she can give them another shot by pulling the threads of their magic or life back together. However, this means that her gift puts a target on her back, and with little to no elemental magic to defend herself with, she relies on her wits and Dol to protect her. Dol has the same backstory as he does in canon- Sydney revived a dying dog she found and he was happily adopted. The wolfhound follows Sydney everywhere, which has given her the nickname Houndsmaster by most of Merit, although the pair are also called the Ghost and the Hound in some circles.

- Design-wise, Sydney shares traits with both Mitch and Dominic, such as the darker fur found on Mitch’s coat and the brighter red that Dominic wears; I wanted them to look like a group without being entirely identical. She also has a tiny bit of blue eyeshadow and hair pigment- according to ADSOM canon, White Londoners often wear a lot of makeup, and I thought that would probably be a trend in Merit as well since the kingdom is supposed to be a little more flippant and arts-focused. I also thought it’d be a cool nod towards all of the eyeshadow she had on when she met Victor in Vicious. As for the hair pigment, that is a massive hint towards who Victor’s other allies are if you’ve seen my ADSOM character designs before. For now, let’s just say it’s a trait she picked up from one of Victor’s cousins- she has a matching patch on the other side too. As for Dol, he’s a black Meritian wolfhound (basically an Irish wolfhound). I never really saw Dol as a Great Dane, he was always fluffy to me, so I went with this breed instead. His gold fang’s are located on his harness.

- In combat, Sydney is the weakest member of the group, so when danger strikes the entire Pack’s priority, including her’s, is to get her out of harm’s way. Usually Dol helps with this by either pulling her to safety or taking down enemies while she finds an exit. He’s tall enough to reach most people’s faces and will happily bite them if Sydney commands him to. As stated above, Sydney doesn’t have any extra magic outside of her Blackhearted ability (this is true for all Blackhearted, it has to do with how they actually get the new abilities), but she usually carries at least one knife on her. I also think she might end up with a crossbow at some point, but I’m still not entirely set on that yet.

So yeah, here’s a sneak peek into the AU and what’s coming up in it! I’ve been really busy recently with lots of projects, so it’s nice to get this done. I’m hoping to do more pics like this for the rest of the main cast. In the meantime, any questions you guys have I’d be happy to answer! I enjoy talking about my AUs and it helps me figure things out. I’m also working on Chapter 2 of White Wolves of London, which will feature a flashback from Victor’s princehood and our first look at Eli, the Blood Saint. It’ll also feature more stuff about Victor’s cousins too! See you guys then!

79 notes · View notes

somnianus · 3 years

Text

On Chinese and Eastern Dramatic Acting vs Western

Part 1 Part 2

Mostly in ref to the Untamed/Word of Honor, but applies to a lot of East Asian works-

I’ve been getting the sense that people I know from the west (also being Asian-American myself) often interpret Chinese/Japanese/Korean drama and theatre to be too corny/cheesy/over-acted. A quick search on some internet forums confirms this. Maybe it’s because I used to watch a lot of C-dramas when I was a kid (Legend of the Condor Heroes/Return of C Heroes/Journey to the West/The Reincarnated Princess/etc), I personally did not notice that the acting was over the top.

I don’t really speak for the quality of acting of these actors because I barely follow them in their careers, but I do know that some of them are immature actors or don’t have much formal training (which may cause the cheesiness above). However, Eastern dramatic acting in general does seem like a common complaint, so I decided to look into it - this is all coming from someone who JUST recently got back into watching C-dramas btw, doing my own research so don’t mind me if there’s some incorrect things down here, I am by NO means at all an expert in drama and theater (lol):

^Villains are often depicted with very exaggerated facial expressions (Above, Xue Yang, The Untamed)

Part 1

1. Chinese concept of mo vs western equivalent of “mimesis” or “imitation”

From this, an excellent chapter on Chinese theatrical concepts vs Western concepts.

Mo plays a significant part in traditional Chinese theatre, usually held to be antithetical to the realism of Western theatre because of its emphasis on theatricality.

Mo means mimesis or imitation, but in a very different sense from the Western concept. One of the first Chinese scholars to use this term, Fu Sinian, used it to compare Western theatre to Chinese theatre:

Presenting a real event and performing an entertaining show are not compatible. The former emphasizes imitation (yige zhong mofang^b); the latter stresses spontaneity and entertainment. The former performance produces a lifelike image; the latter has nothing to produce. The former puts emphasis on the plot; the latter puts emphasis on theatricality. Therefore they are completely contradictory to one another.

This guy actually goes onto critique Chinese theater, saying it should be more like Western realism, so that there will “be no singing, and the acting will imitate people’s real gestures.” However! Other Chinese critics tried to approach Western vs traditional Chinese drama as two DIFFERENT but still valid forms of art. For example, Yu Shangyuan (1927) said western performance is “writing realistically” (xie shi) and chinese performance as “writing suggestively” (xie yi). Western dramas really rely on an accurate/semi-accurate representation of life and realism. Traditional Chinese drama and acting relied on the “symbolic and imaginative.”

Then what is mo? It is the emotional display, the emotional revelation, that is shown on stage. Starting from the Yuan dynasty, the Chinese drama was thought to be a continuation of poetry rather than its own independent stage art.

Poetry is where the intent of the heart goes. Lying in the heart, it is “intent”; when uttered in words, it is “poetry.” When an emotion stirs inside, one expresses it in words; finding this inadequate, one sighs over it; not content with this, one sings it in poetry; still not satisfied, one unconsciously dances with one’s hands and feet. [anonymous, 1975, from Shi Daxu 200 BCE]

Chinese drama with dancing and singing, was the most expressive product of poetry. The importance of mo cannot be stressed enough - it is the measure by which traditional Chinese drama was judged, how well this drama make you feel? Love, pain, loss, guilt, happiness? Plot becomes something that doesn’t matter as much (more on that later).

^Beijing/Peking Opera - highly stylized, emotive, “unrealistic” performances

To emphasize how central and important this concept is, it’s thought that a good Chinese playwright never fails to “seize a highly dramatic scene to stage an elaborate presentation of an emotional state.”

Love is of source unknown, yet it grows ever deeper. The living may die of it, by its power the dead live again. [Peony Pavilion, Mu dan ting]

This quote really shows how important it was to show these emotions on stage, to inspire the audience to feel deeply. Chinese critics believed that the best part about drama was how efficient it is to display emotion. Playwrights should “depict extreme bitterness, extreme happiness, extreme silliness, and extreme sobriety; imitate these feelings to the utmost (miao mo jin xing^p).”

Such performances are not necessarily accurately mimicking reality, but they are obtained through the “revelation” of a character’s internal emotional world.

2. Mo vs the depiction of reality or theatrical truth

The Chinese concept of aesthetic truth relates a lot to theatrical truth. In a lot of traditional Chinese art, painting, poetry, etc, aesthetic truth is not empirical, and doesn’t have to be accurate to life, or realistic. It’s a “truth that lies beyond mere superficial likeness.”

To the Chinese artist, an accurate resemblance between art and reality is not only superficial but often distorting. Chinese artists hold a dialectical view on the “form” (xing) and the “spirit” or “content” (shen) of an artistic object. According to them, xing and shen are not always complementary. On the contrary, they often stand in opposition to one another. (referenced in the chapter above)

Traditional Chinese artists would rather represent the object with the wish that their representation matches its spirit, or abstract identity, than its actual form because a “photographic image is a shallow image.” It’s easy to draw a picture of something realistically, but it’s much harder and more satisfying to depict its nature, its feeling, its spirit.

This also naturally affects theater and dramatic performances.

Dramatic writing can be divided into two types: “a painting-like work” or a “transformed work,” in which the latter has higher artistic value because it reaches more towards the essence of dramatic object. Realistic imitations are fine, but they’re not really enough to reveal the mo or true feelings of something.

In addition, traditional Chinese dramatists believe that “all dramas are nothing but allegories. One need not ask about their origins in actual life.” You might be able to see, then, that these older playwrights and critics really fancied the overdramatic depictions of emotions.

a. The Chinese notion of theatrical truth/aesthetic truth vs European

Onto what we, as part of the Western audience, are more used to:

For Italian neoclassical critics, the pleasure of a drama hinges on how accurate, how realistic, the depiction is. Castelvetro, the leading Italian Neo-Classical critic and creator of the concept of “the three unities,” claims thus:

We cannot imagine a king who did not exist, nor attribute any action to him.

Another Italian critic, Robortellus, said that a creative/imaginative story with no “verisimilitude” (truthfulness, in this context, realism) is less appealing than one that imitates a real-life event:

Thus if a tragic plot contained an action which did not really take place and was not true, but was represented by the poet himself in accordance with verisimiltude, it would perhaps move the souls of the auditors, but certainly less.

So basically, it’s fundamentally the opposite of Chinese theater. Italian dramatic works prized being realistic, being properly adapted from reality and real events. Chinese dramatic works, however, enjoyed the emphasis on heartfelt emotional demonstrations, or mo. Even in critical writings, the word “truth” is used, but it is usually used to modify the word “heart” or “emotion.” It is very concerned with the internal, the truthfulness of heartfelt emotional expression.

Taken these contexts, you can see why the Chinese stage/dramas are wholly “unreal” as Tao-Ching Hsu puts it. Everything, the makeup, the costumes, the props, is expressive and suggestive rather than imitative.

b. Bejing/Peking Opera, jingju

A famous example is the Beijing/Peking Opera, jingju. The makeup and costumes themselves are fantastical representations. The colors and patterns suggest different moods, temperaments, characters, and even changes in emotions. Actors would make distinct movements to depict distinct emotions with varying levels of energy. The stage itself may be sparse, because it is not as important as the expression of emotion and drama.

The stage is sparse not because of the lack of technology or funding, but because it leaves room for the actor themselves to fully express their internal thinking/feeling/emotions. Characters can cross hundreds of miles in a few steps or may take the whole stage to cross a supposed road. This representation looks “unreal” to a realistic-minded audience, but it is very genuine to a Chinese audience.

Summary (so far)

This crucial understanding of the concept of mo (the emotional revelation), and the way traditional Chinese drama depicts life and stories, informs how their modern works are also portrayed. Coming from a Western dramatic background, where realism and plot are the most important aspects of a work, it can be very confusing, right? Even Chinese scholars began to judge their own dramatic works through a Western lens.

How does this traditional background affect modern Chinese dramas and works? I think it still has a very large effect, even though much of Western ideals about dramatic works have been heavily integrated into modern Chinese dramas.

Part 2: On Theatricality and how it transfers into Chinese Cinema

#cdramas #theater #acting style #beijing opera #the untamed #word of honor #kdramas #jdramas #theatricality #east asian cinema

122 notes · View notes

masquayla-the-splendid · 2 years

Text

Gracious yalls are raggin on SatAM in the tags more than I see anywhere else. "skrosksk environmentalism 🧠🔨" man I just wanna see fanart 🪑

Foist of all, the most common misconception I see is that every freedom fighter is anti technology. However, the only group we see that is true to this title would be the Wolf Pack. From the episode "Cry of the Wolf." Clearly stated with the main characters, we see that Sally has a device named Nicole, Rotor is The Tech Guy™, and Bunnie is literally half robot. Of course not by choice, but it gives a lot of advantages for the team. Heck even Uncle Chuck worked on this kinda stuff, considering he made the machine that defines Robotnik's character, which I'll get to later. Now yes, there are environmentalist undertones, but this was a common theme for 90s cartoons. I re watch this show a lot, and it never looks dead in the camera and tells you to plant a tree. If anything, Adventures of Sonic does that.

And then there's Robotnik. There's like an ongoing war with how this guy was interpreted. I'll give it a rating first.

Design: 6/10

Character: 7/10

Voice: 10/10

Starting with his design. Well, long story short, they didn't get his JP ref sheet. The producers of SatAM, among other fairly early Sonic continuity writers, were only given so much detail into this universe that they had to pull a few straws to make things a bit more...."consise." To put it in short terms, all they got was "Robotnik is the egg shaped bad guy who turns animals into robots." The concept art is very surreal, and just barely has the essence of Eggman. But hey, they kept the formula right. Red on top, black on bottom, yellow cape, big ol mustache. His villain generic black/red eyes are most likely AMSegas promotional art mistaking his glasses on his sprite for soulless caves. Not quite, but they got the right idea in the end. (the robotic arm is a nice touch)

His character is one that I exclusively tie to SatAM. Like if you say "Robotnik" instead of "Eggman," this is usually the first guy I think of. This is the only interpretation of him that actually took over, and poses as an serious threat, (that was well written *cough*Forces) so there's not a lot I can compare him to. A common complaint I see with this guy is that he always sits around while his robots or Snively do all the heavy lifting. While true, I see it as that he thinks so lowly of Sonic's team, he barely bats an eye or leaves his chair to deal with them. They're just that beneath him. Oh and the Naugus scene. Honestly, it was a little rushed. I feel like that's why it was so absurd. Naugus' little act was explained in one episode. They play Robotnik as this fearless warlord, so they wanted to give him something to be afraid of. Because despite his robotic appendages, he is a human. Don't even get me started on his an Snively's dynamic, that is for another day. As much as I like this interpretation, I hate the roboticizer twist. This ain't even a misinterpretation thing, they knew that was the whole point of his character. In short, he's your average edgy 90s big bad, except crank the darkness up like a few notches. Stands out across the sea of goofy eggmen.

Here's a cursed fact, he's got the same VA of Winnie the Pooh! Have that image brandished in your head. The deliveries of 80% of his lines really show how much of a creep he is. Like the shudders he does in between lines are actually unsettling. Snively does this too sometimes, but Robotnik's is too believably sadistic. There's a scene where there was like no music playing, in the beat of silence you could hear the frikkin harty inhale before delivering the next line and it made me physically recoil. Only one other character has successfully portrayed themselves with their voice alone, and got that reaction outta me, and that's the Pumpkin Rabbit from the Walten Files. Underground may have the same Robotnik design, but SatAMs got the fitting voice.

Obviously this ain't the perfect cartoon with a prime message. Heck, newer shows like Steven Universe tackle a lot of heavier topics, and it doesn't have the best writing either. But it stands strong for only having 23 episodes, with several airing and production issues, ie Antoine filler episodes/THE cliffhanger. There's so many "what could've been"s for this show that outweigh the "already are"s.

#sonic the hedgehog #Sth #Satam #sonic satam

16 notes · View notes

remadra · 4 years

Photo

BORROWER GORDON AND LITTLE BENREY COMPLETE!!!!

I’m so glad I finished, these two took a while- and I promised myself I wouldn’t touch it anymore so no more adjustments gbyfhdsss

my process of sketch to complete under the cut!

First I do my sketch, which can range from general lines to more detailed like I did here! I don’t really use the artist skeletons for poses I’m used to using, but they do help with proportions. I still used the line down the face for symmetry and circled the heels! If I’m doing dynamic poses, or ones with different perspective than head-on, I’ll use the full reference skeleton and round it out with circles to get a feeling before I set in on solidifying the sketch. Since these designs are character concept and the sketches are pulled from individual ref sheets, I went with whatever I thought was cool at the time. Then I darkened what I was set on having with my pencil tool. (I use FireAlpaca, and work with 2px-5px brushes)

This is the stage where I also take into account any changes, like removing Benrey’s boots here. I didn’t get a shot of how I changed them, but essentially I took the same approach as with on paper. Erase and get a general shape down, then check it against the rest of the design.

Next is the line art layer, where I trace all the outlines first. Big creases, edges, places where material changes and dark shadows are first. I used a 5px pen for these lines, and it looks nice and clean compared to the sketch when I’m done! As I line, I make my final decisions on what I’m including. I removed stitches and lines that I didn’t feel were needed to get the point across, as well as leaving out the extra square of padding on Gordon’s chest armor. I also added a few more seams to Benrey’s pants, to get a more patched-together feel. Then I started using (very lazy at some points) hatching to denote shadows. This is important for me because I have a tendency to not darken and blend my shadows enough. It leaves my lighting to look very flat, so I force myself to take into account more drastic shades by adding in the dark brown I use for lining. This layer takes the most time, and it’s where I get pickiest. When I color, I’ll still be going back and adjusting the hatching to blend more smoothly with whatever tone I’m using. At that point, I usually shrink my pen down to 3px.

This is usually when I erase my sketch to color on the layer under the line art, but this time I added a new layer and moved it under to keep the sketch!

I do my general flats, comparing the tones to where I want to draw attention to! I want Benrey’s eyes to stand out, so I use a cold yellow and (nearly neon) blue against faded browns and red toned shadows. With soft dark blues and the bright red of his Coke can armor, the Little’s skin tone is a bit less unnatural than if I used green and yellow. I want to draw attention away from Gordon’s lack of facial hair, since in this AU, Gordon is trans and doesn’t have a beard (yet.). Even though I knew from the start that I was going to be running with this, beardless Gordon still looks weird to me. So I grabbed a relatively bright tan and orange compared to the rest of him for his shirt. Lucky for me, this also emphasized the creases and how ill-fitting Gordon’s clothes are. I used straight greys for the metal knee and shin guards on Gordon, which ended up looking very blue next to the browns and tone of his pants.

All of my shading is happening at the same time. I use the default watercolor brush with a size of 2px to 15px and blend as much as I can. For stitches or tiny areas surrounded by an overwhelming color, I go back to the 4px pen. I color pick by picking out the edges of the line art on top of the color and go with that since it’s usually a lot darker and shades quickly.

During the whole process, if I’m feeling something’s off, I get a second opinion from an outside source. It’s helped me avoid some really awkward art!

Aaaand that’s my drawing process!

#hlvrai #hlvrai benrey #hlvrai gordon #borrowers au #littles au #borrowers and littles au #frenrey #benrey #benry #frenry

134 notes · View notes

kashuan · 4 years

Text

All right, there are quite a few things that come to mind with a question as broad as this, so here’s my best attempt to sum up what character design means to me in like 5 minutes :,D. I’m going to start with a few very quick sketches that talk about more my general approach to drawing, but I’m going to build up to how it all connects with character.

Step 1) Find reference! Whenever you can, use reference, it will always make your character’s posing look 100 times more genuine than anything you can pull from your brain, and that’s nothing to feel bad about. It’s not cheating because we’re not stopping at Step 2 either, which is where the misnomer comes in that you’re just ‘copying’ (protip: even step 2 isn’t a straight Copy; as long as you’re not tracing, you’re not copying, and even tracing has its uses for personal studies). I could do a whole answer of it’s own about picking your reference, but I’ll keep it short by saying: not every reference will fit every character. Keep in mind your character’s attitude when choosing your ref. Some poses are so generic they’re one size fits all, but even this very simple pose has unique character to it. The way the legs are posed, to me, gives it a young and girlish feeling, and depending how you played with the expression, you could even make it come off shy. An overbearingly confident character, while also taking an arms crossed pose, will likely position their legs differently, assuming a stance that takes up more space, etc.

Step 2) Draw pretty much exactly what you see first, but keep it simple. Think of the body like individual shapes; anatomy is not the focus right now, and you’ll actually hinder yourself if you hone in on that first. What you want to do at this stage is capture what the pose is generally doing; character isn’t involved yet Step 3) Now, working off 2′s framework, start considering body type. If you skip the previous step, you might have a hard time capturing the gesture correctly, since it’s a lot for your brain to juggle at once. When I sketched these two different body types, I built it straight off the first drawing, erasing lines as needed.

So the first image includes some extremely basic body type variations, this one pushes that idea further. 1 is the basic frame from the last image, while 2 is about playing with proportions. There are a lot of ways you can play with proportions, and as I’ll come to sound like a broken record about: make those decisions thoughtfully. For example, when I made this version shorter than the reference base, I had to consider exactly where I wanted her to lose that height. Here, I made her shorter waisted, took a little length from the legs, and gave her a squatter neck as well. You can do one of these or all of them. Just keep in mind those are all individual options. Letting your train of thought stop at ‘this character is short/tall so I’m just going to generally shrink/stretch their body’ means you’ll run out of variety pretty fast, and sometimes the overall proportions can end up looking wonky (though there’s always exceptions to the rule, remember that the individual body parts should remain correctly scaled in relation to each other). Image 3 is another approach to proportional manipulation, except rather than focusing on height, it focuses on fat distribution and to a lesser extent bone structure. Again, there’s so many individual places you can focus on here, make sure to mix them up. Arm size, shoulder broadness, chest and hip size, leg thickness and musculature, foot and hand size and so forth. Image 4 is a further exaggeration of image 3 and the lines have started to get a little more stylized. While image 3 is still reasonably realistic, 4 is just starting to cross into cartoon territory. Advantage of 4 is that when you are able to push the proportions further due to the leniency of style, you can sell a clearer idea and a clearer character. Downside is, well, it looks more cartoonish now, and depending on the needs of your image that might not be what you want ie: it can look like a mistake rather than a purposeful choice if everyone else around the character is drawn more realistically.

Also… I see variations on this general advice quite a lot for women, but don’t forget about doing the same for men. It’s great to see how eager a lot of artists are to experiment with the female form that is simply absent in a lot of mainstream media, but I find that men really tend to fall by the wayside here even though they often get equally shallow treatment in the mainstream. There’s usually like 2-3 ‘go-to’ body types for men and that’s it. Men’s bodies can have the exact same amount of variety as a woman’s, including the individual ways the fat can be distributed on it, and the assorted ways their proportions can be played with. Whenever I find an artist that does this it’s like striking gold to me tbh.

So there’s some very rough hows. But, perhaps even more importantly than any of that, is WHY you make these choices. This is going to get a little stream of consciousness, but with a question this broad, I tried to hit on as many general points I could think of in regard to my own process.

-When I start to design a character, I really need to have an understanding of them first. This includes things like backstory, personality, habits, so and so forth… Yes, all of this stuff shows up in their design, even if it’s just a drawing of them standing straight up. This isn’t just like ‘this character got this scar at age 7 so I need to know where it goes′, I mean in depth info about them. I touched on this a little bit earlier, bringing up the different ways a character would assume the same general pose, but let me expand on that. -What do I mean by personality? So there’s the most obvious answer, which is that a bubbly character will assume bubbly poses, a sullen character will slouch more, etc… But let’s take it further than that. This is a concept I’ve touched on in past tutorials, but here’s a quick recap. A character’s personality involves their opinions, for one; how do you make that show up in their design? Well, one of the most obvious questions I always ask myself is: what is their opinion on their own appearance (the thing we are drawing)/how do they want to be perceived by others? Consider a strong character. I see a lot of artists who take this thought as far as: okay, this character is strong, so I’m gonna throw a 6 pack on him, maybe a nice pair of guns, and call it a day. Which leads to like, nice art, but also...kind of bland? I think that’s because this is a rather half-baked approach. How can we take it further? Ask yourself more specific questions. Is your strong character concerned with being perceived as an ‘ideal’ sort of fit by others (the type you give that showy 6 pack to) or does that not matter to them? (more likely to look ‘chubby’ if not outright fat, though probably is just as if not more capable of actually doing some real heavy lifting than saran wrapped abs man). If they’re some kind of mystical being that can look like whatever they want (ie: the anime waif that can also lift 1000 lbs-trope), you should still take into account their personal perspective on appearance. Don’t just stop at ‘this guy/girl is strong so they’ll look super shredded’ or ‘they’re magic so I’ll do whatever’. Doing this, you’ve instantly lost a chance to inform the audience more about the individual there beyond ‘they’re strong’ -Break it down further with their habits. What is their daily life like? If they’re running ten miles every day they should probably have some strong looking legs. If their job involves a lot of lifting, maybe focus on the upper body more and leave the legs less defined. Do they eat a lot? Or drink? The way the fat distributes in both these cases will be noticeably different (and this isn’t even taking into account points like an endomorph vs an ectomorphs body, which I always suggest reading up on). I’d definitely recommend drawing as many different body types as you can just as studies, in order to add these variations to your mental library. I’m sure every artist has seen this popular athlete line up by now, but really study images like this. Don’t just mindlessly copy what you see when you create your own characters though; think about why those athletes have the bodies they have, what they specifically did to get them like that, and how that can apply to your character’s own life. -One thing that has always bothered me is how often artists are afraid to use the head (not the features; I’ll get to that in a second) as an extension of the body when it comes to imbuing it with variety and character. While it is absolutely possible to have a thin face and a fat body (as is any combo), it’s another missed opportunity not to experiment with chubby cheeks, a soft jawline, etc. It’s a cliche to mention him at this point as an inspiration, but one of my very favorite things about Mucha’s art was how he was able to make fuller faces look so beautiful despite being a rather nontraditional approach (so many art books try to tell you this is a big NO). example, example. These faces actually look like real individuals to me than a drawing that focuses too hard on being generically aesthetically pleasing. -So, facial features. A face with less traditional features isn’t just going to be more memorable than Stock Beautiful Face #73, but it’s basically a more zoomed in version of informing the audience about the character in the same way the body does. -Know tropes, play with tropes, do not rely on tropes. Sunken bone structure, long features-guy will always pretty much read like a villain (or at least someone off-putting), but find somewhere to make the formula your own. Give him thicker eyebrows or big ears. Give the girl with the standard doll-face a nose that sticks out a little more prominently or a crooked smile. -Speaking of are so many different ways to draw a smile, do not underestimate the mileage you can get out of this one feature alone. Artists tend to have a favorite way to draw smiles, in my experience, but remember your character. Would they have a big toothy grin, a handsome ‘cool’ looking smile, a small shy lopsided one, ones that touch the eyes, ones that don’t… This is probably a repetitive point by now but just do whatever you can not to draw the exact same feature on two different characters, and make sure to think through your reasoning for every choice you make. To me, it’s always immediately evident if an artist really knows their character or if they’re just trying to make something aesthetically pleasing. The former is always more attention grabbing in my opinion. -One of my favorite things to consider when designing a character who’s part of a family: genetics and how you can play with them to inform the audience more about the character’s story. Does this character take after their mother or father? How? Why? Why why, you might ask? This isn’t a photo of a real person, this is an illustration that you should be making deliberate choices about every step along the way. It’s one thing to draw a character that looks like their parent simply because logic dictates they should, another to make meaningful decisions as to where and why they do. Some examples: He has his father’s eyes because they carry the same intensity and other characters are a little put off by him because it (conversely, maybe he’s such a gentle character that this detail stands out twice as strongly). He has the same hair as his father, but he styles it differently to avoid the association. She has her mother’s nose which everyone compliments her on so shes happy to be seen in profile. She has her father’s broad shoulders and she’s a little self conscious about it so she tends to wear baggier clothing. Etc etc! In all these cases, you can communicate these details through even a simple drawing of the character standing alone, and should try to as often as you can. -In the end, the only way you’re going to know how to draw all these different details, whether they be different body types or different facial features, is by studying real people. Draw as many different kinds as you can, add them to your mental library. Your reference will never give you everything you need to work it, and I’m not sure if that’s maybe what this question as getting at-- if I have a reference folder of go-to ‘types’ or something. I don’t. I have a folder of poses labeled with characters I think they’d fit, and that’s about it. If you’re just imitating what you see in a photo, you’ll always be drawing That Person, not Your Character. So you are going to have to pull some of it out of your brain. Note, however, the important difference between just ‘making it up’ and recalling information you’ve studied in the past. That said, while on this last topic of expanding your mental library, that includes not just doing studies, but also learning and observing the ways other accomplished artists work. Here are some of my book recommendations when it comes to those which have most helped me in regard to this particular subject. This includes books that specifically tell you how to vary your body types, but also ones that just have a lot of examples of different kinds: Morpho: Anatomy for Artists Morpho: Fat and Skin Folds Famous Artists School Course in Illustration and Design (If anyone is interested in this one and has trouble finding a non $500 copy, hit me up and I’ll help you out) Spirit of the Pose Anatomy Lessons from the Great Masters Drawing People: How to Portray the Clothed Figure Figures from Life (my favorite currently; not the most varied array of figures but he goes in depth on how to successfully grow an academic study of a model into an illustration influenced by your own ideas and personal style) If you found this answer helpful, although it isn’t specifically about character design, I go a little more in depth about some of the topics I briefly covered here (such as choosing the right reference, good vs bad reference in general, honing in on shapes, pushing the pose, etc) in this short book of mine :>

#tumblr messed up the coding on the original ask so I had to repost this!#art tutorial #hope this helps!!#not sure if got a little too rambly #i wonder if it's hashtag justintpthings to spend 3/4ths of a post talking about how to draw by talking about thinking lol

115 notes · View notes

tillman · 4 years

Note

do you have any advice on how to draw armor?? please im dying

yeas <3 so right off the bat i think its important to state but my like. basis from drawing armor is almost completely off of my history of drawing soulsborne characters...... i have a disease, but anywyas yea. i highly recommend it for explorations of interesting yet accurate armor design :-) my favorite designs are from 2 and demons, and i steal a lot of inspiration from their concept art. i simply think it should be ok to take how you draw/view armor or something like that from something else. armor is goofy just draw whatever looks cool.

how i draw armor is basically separating it into sections to focus on ..

heres a lionel fr ref. layering is really important i think. i usually just kinda mix up what exactly i have fr each bit but uhhh that works.

from there its just shoving random metal, a cape, and some other doohickeys on top. i recommend looking at either preexisting armor or video game/tv show/what have you armor designs you like and just taking bits from it to make your own :-)

for gauntlets and the like i usually just simplify it to the point of pointing out where the knuckles are. theyre pretty simple to just shove shit on top of to mkae fancier but theyre super basic. sabbatons too you can get away with just showing where the foot will bend cus they got sooo many segments. think worms. worm shoes.

other than that. if u dont wanna draw a bit just shove a cape on top. i promise no one will notice. people will think its cool. capes always improve a design. i draw every single character with armor with a cape so i dont have to draw it sometimes. or so i just have to draw hints of it. its fine cheating is epic.

uhhh thats kinda all my off the top of my head tips i hope any of them help feel free to ask more specific shit im not good at teaching shit like this :pensive:

#for chainmail just look up creighton dark souls and bam! now you know how i design chainmail designs

46 notes · View notes

thecreaturecodex · 4 years

Text

Equiceph

Art © Wizards of the Coast, by Stephen Tappin. Accessed at the D&D Miniatures Handbook Art Gallery here

[Welcome to Furtober! Throughout the month, I will be spotlighting miscellaneous anthropomorphic animals that have appeared in D&D over the editions. There’s a lot of them--I found 45 that I would be interested in enough to convert on a pretty superficial pass through Third Edition, and that doesn’t count other editions, obscure books, Dragon or Dungeon Magazine, or spinoff games like Hackmaster or Arduin. So if this is popular, Furtober may become a long standing tradition.

The Miniatures Handbook was not quite fish or fowl. It was primarily a detailed version of the rules for the D&D Miniatures game that developed in 3rd edition, but also served as a clearinghouse for various concepts that the authors wanted to try out in D&D 3.5. So you had a full on healer class, a warmage, some spells and feats that mimicked rules the mini game had, and some monsters. A surprising percentage of those monsters are anthropomorphic animals, and it featured the first appearance of a generic “catfolk” in D&D (the tabaxi name is much older, dating back to The Isle of Dread). The equiceph, like some of the other concepts in The Miniatures Handbook, was a refugee from Chainmail, Wizards of the Coast’s previous attempt in late 2e/early 3e to have a spinoff miniature wargame from the D&D license.]

Equiceph CR 3 LE Monstrous Humanoid This giant humanoid wears heavy armor and has the oversized head of a horse. It clutches a cruel polearm.

Equicephs are oversized, horse-like humanoids with a penchant for cruelty and slavery. They are cunning raiders, and usually live in small bands tended to by a large and rotating slave population. Hobgoblins are favorite slaves, as they have similarly orderly minds. Some especially powerful hobgoblin tribes turn the tables on equicephs, however; equiceph slave soldiers can be found in hobgoblin armies as shock troopers.

Most equicephs place a high priority on capturing and looting their enemies rather than merely killing them. They have keen tactical minds, and typically make sure to flank enemies, attack from high ground, and otherwise eke out minor advantages wherever they can. An equiceph often fights by inches, slowly grinding their opponents down. They use their slaves in combat as disposable soldiers, and will happily allow all of them to die rather than be killed themselves.

According to the equicephs, they are the descendants of exiles. The equiceph empire was a peaceful place, and a rogue faction thought that they could take advantage of that peace and stage a coup. The coup failed and its members were sent across the sea rather than be executed. If the equicephs ever had their own language, it is now forgotten, and many sages believe that the dream of the equicephs returning to their homeland and avenging their ancestors is nothing more than a fantasy.

An equiceph stands about 11 feet tall and weighs more than 900 pounds. They favor heavy armor and heavy weapons. Equicephs advance by character class, with fighter and ranger being common choices.

Equiceph CR 3 XP 800 LE Large monstrous humanoid Init +0; Senses darkvision 60 ft., Perception +8 Defense AC 18, touch 9, flat-footed 18 (-1 size, +7 armor, +2 natural) hp 26 (4d10+4) Fort +2, Ref +4, Will +5 Offense Speed 30 ft., (40 ft. unarmored) Melee halberd +7 (2d8+6/x3) Ranged javelin +3 (1d8+4) Space 10 ft.; Reach 10 ft. Special Attacks punishing maneuver Statistics Str 18, Dex 11, Con 12, Int 13, Wis 12, Cha 11 Base Atk +4; CMB +9; CMD 19 Feats Combat Expertise, Endurance (B), Intimidating Prowess Skills Climb +2, Heal +5, Intimidate +11, Perception +8, Survival +8, Swim +2 Languages Common, Goblin Ecology Environment temperate plains and hills Organization solitary, pair, or gang (3-6 plus 2-8 hobgoblin slaves) Treasure standard (halberd, three javelins, splint mail, healer’s kit, other treasure) Special Abilities Punishing Maneuver (Ex) Whenever an equiceph succeeds at a combat maneuver against an opponent, it deals 1d6 points of nonlethal damage to that opponent.

#equiceph #furtober #pathfinder 1e #D&D #furry

42 notes · View notes

zitkaplushie · 4 years

Text

nightwing secret files liveblog:

this is gonna be a long one so it’s under a cut!

taking wing-

is that jason??

i like this 'a christmas carol' type exposition i'm ngl

i'm not sure if 'jason''s dismissal of the circus is dixon using an unreliable narrator, or if dixon actually believes that

god i hate this art so much

how dare u insult the teen titans in any way 😤 i like the name

also titans cameo!!

more awful jason characterisation (pls dixon just stay 8732894738 feet away from jason)

"without robin i have no family" i guess the titans are just chopped liver huh

"i always thought that one day i'd be batman" nope nope nope nope you have 0 understanding of dick's character if that's what you think mr dixon

i love clark having a part in dick becoming nightwing - i adore it - but the way dixon retcons the importance of the titans, and especially kory, in dick becoming nightwing rubs me the complete wrong way. i'm choosing to read this as a between the scenes moment, but i 100% dixon intended this to replace the titans' importance. and the way ppl just swallow it up w/o thinking about the reasons behind why dixon would want to erase the titans - and kory - pisses me off lmao

"i didn't mean to stay so long [with the titans]" *eternal screaming* he really wants to undermine the titans at every possible turn wow

at least the next page acknowledges the importance of kory in dick's life, but right afterwards we have "lmao she must've liked your costume. all the girls did. you're a chick magnet" (paraphrased) and i'm just back to sighing

also hi i'm mad at the framing of babs being the endgame bc of course they'd do that. and also at kory being shorter than dick. thanks! i hate it! i'm willing to bet that dixon asked for that specifically.

"this is where i came in" i'm confused at this part but tbh i don't care enough to think abt it any more

i'm also ughhhh at the way they're trying to give bludhaven importance. i don't care, i don't like it, he should've never moved there

ok i do really like that last page

the fact files things are good enough, i love the art for the haly's circus one! the pt barnum ref is 😬 though (ik ik it's the 90s but fjskdh why)

lost pages: teen titans-

ok so, i don't like devin grayson. i don't like her writing at all, i don't think she gets the characters at all, and hot take: if you dislike a character who's super important part of dick's life, and helped him come into his own and be who he is, you shouldn't be writing that character. (i'm talking about kory here, but tbh if you dislike any of the characters who dick interacts with frequently and are a huge part of his life - especially his love interests, and his family - you shouldn't be writing dick.) so i'm not going into this story with high hopes. however i've seen ppl talk about this story as being really good so i hope i'll like it too

you can tell she mostly cares about the fab five, which wouldn't be a problem if she treated the ntt characters better but alas ://

kory and vic both say 1 thing the entire page lmao

ALSO KORY NOT KNOWING WHAT DAY IT IS IS ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT I CANNOT BELIEVE

i loooove the parallel between dick grasping wally's hand and young!dick holding his dad's hand 🥺🥺🥺🥺

vic legit says one thing the entire story lmaoooooooo 🙃🙃🙃

i love garth and roy being brought to the tower 🥺

this is def some of grayson's better work, but it suffers from the same thing all of her stories do. she doesn't fully understand all the characters. if one character is off it affects the whole story. a lot of her stories have good ideas and poor execution, and this one definitely doesn't have awful execution but there's still something missing and as someone who loves the titans it's just sad. i get why people like this story - it made me tear up at the end ngl - but the rest of the titans are just as important as dick and it feels like the writer doesn't understand that. (i get this is a dick comic but it's still a titans story.) (it does however make me want to write a fic expanding upon this moment and the aftermath bc the idea of the titans all coming together to cheer dick up is so goooooood. are they gonna have a party celebrating dick's parent's lives? are they gonna eat junk food and watch a comfort movie? are they gonna just sit and talk?? the possibilities are endless!!)

the art is gorgeous as all of jimenez' art is, i love his style so freaking much!!

the next page is of the bludhaven supporting cast and all it does is remind me how much i do not care abt them. i think the only one i actually like is clancy, the others are expendable and forgettable. (i do love clancy a lot though, i wish she'd been written by more people than just dixon). though, i usually love guice's art, i think i actually prefer mcdaniel's take on clancy??? which is 100% a first for me.

i like seeing the set up to dick's apartment, bc i'm a sucker for layouts and maps. i wish this comic was way better written bc the concept of dick living in an apartment building and interacting with his neighbours is one i really like, esp in superhero comics. but again i have to say, alas.

a day in the life of nite-wing/hangin'-with tad:

painful... just painful...

i physically couldn't care less about this if you paid me

the next page is tad's file and i am Not Reading That. nope nope nope. and also fuck you.

next is a map of bludhaven, and like i said, i'm a sucker for maps.

the page after that is brutale's file and again i just do not care. the art is by damion scott who i really like, but the design looks like knock off scarecrow so

the next pages are files for double dare, lady vidc, shrike and blockbuster and i'm skipping them all bc i give negative fucks

next is a spread of what i assume is dick's cork-board? it looks kinda interesting but the writing is hard to make out and i don't care enough to try to decipher it

next is torque's files and same same, idc idc

nightwing's romances/orange you glad i didn't say banana?:

ok so y'all know i hate dickbabs. i hate everything about how it was built on the foundation of tearing down kory and dickkory and i'm a kory fan first and foremost so i hate this whole situation. so i'm already predisposed to disliking anything that talks about how babs is dick's true love, and talks down any of his other love interests. i come into this with an admitted bias. i'd try to be charitable but i don't see why i should when no one involved in the writing of dickbabs is charitable towards my faves so 🤷

i love love love stelfreeze's art! he's drawn babs in something else i read and i loved it then and i love it here!

i adore dick and babs' friendship, so the beginning is really sweet and cute. i also love the concept of baby!dickie being obsessed with watermelons and wanting to eat them forever

dewey decimal system!!! librarian babs reference!! fdjkh she's such a nerd i love it

babs trying to talk about romance and dick's like 'lol nah what abt fighting' lmao

i Do Not like babs hitting dick while talking abt 'i was segueing into talking about romance, hint hint'

this is romance? dick giving exactly 0 fucks?

why are these writers obsessed with hinting at dick and donna??? like first dixon and now grayson??? please stop!!!! i do love how he says he loves her bc 🥺🥺🥺 i love them

ur not being slick having babs call donna 'donna' and kory 'starfire', i see you grayson. i see ur hate for kory.

and reducing kory to just her body, and dick's sexual attraction to her boils my blood

i'm choosing to interpret babs's face in that panel as her being attracted to kory too

i do like that dick talks about being in love with kory, and thinking about still being with her. a) i'll take those crumbs, and b) thats how i see dick's relationship to love as being (though devin views him as kinda flighty and unfaithful so idk how we're agreeing on this lmao)

pls stop talking shit abt huntress devin, ur the one who made dick/hel a thing

since devin loves her brudick subtext, i'm side-eyeing the mention of bruce there

also why are we hinting at cass pls stop

babs being jealous and petty pls stop

the ending was smooth i have to admit it. if it was any other ship i'd probs love it but as it is, i'm tired of everyone else being downplayed in favour of the ~babs is dick's true loooooveee, it's always been herrrrr, from the beginningggggg~

i don't mind babs being dick's first crush though, in fact that's my hc for him because hello?? who wouldn't have a crush on babs??

thank you mr stelfreeze for accurately portraying babs' bitchface bc she's being a petty bitch here (and i love her but lmaooo i hate this whole thing)

next is the files on the bludhaven pd and i do not caaaare

then there's a timeline, but i don't care about any timeline that dixon writes. i'm petty though so i'm gonna read it and talk abt why i don't like the retcons.

i hate the dickbabs reference in YEAR FUCKING 3 jfc. pls stop with the retcons.

also lmao the difference between the way dick's canon relationship from that time is described in the shittiest way possible (though reluctant at first, dick begins a long and tumultuous romance with teammate starfire.) and how he wrote dick and babs' relationship (robin first teams with ... barbara in her guise as batgirl. the two will pair time and again over the course of their careers and develop a burgeoning affection for one another) this was at a time when they weren't even remotely interested in each other!!! there was no affections there dixon! no matter how much you wish it to be true!! and again the contrast with 'starfire' and 'barbara'! like it's dehumanising and i hate it.

and he can't even bother to get the new teen titans' team name right.

no mention of kory's importance in dick becoming nightwing, nope we ignore that bc it's thanks to superman now.

stepping away from the way he hates kory to talk about the way he hates jason! jason's described as a 'troubled orphan' and a 'juvenile delinquent'.

no mentions of how jason and dick bonded but as soon as tim gets introduced he talks about how dick and tim 'switfly bond as brothers'.

another incredibly impersonal description of dick and kory's relationship (the wedding of dick grayson and kory anders (aka starfire) is aborted by the rogue titan raven. dick and kory soon part company and dissolve their relationship.) but at least he calls her kory this time.

also i love how he speeds up through all the 'non important' development for dick but spends a whole page talking about all the bullshit he's been writing for nightwing. i understand why, but it's just lmaooooo 🙃 when you read it like that, it really shows how shitty this comic is.

talks of the 'doomed relationship' between dick and hel and i really hate it pls stop

the last page is dick's evaluation by the police academy and i do not care so i'm skipping it too.

#welp. this comic was a ride. i hated 95% of it and i hate dixon and grayson's writing #antidickbabs #bc i talked a lot of shit abt them #and i'm free to do so but i'm tagging for ppl who don't want to see ship hate #reyes reads comics #reyes.txt #long post #negative #for the blacklist #edit - i added a cut bc it was too long #2nd edit - ooff so many typos

10 notes · View notes

daincrediblegg · 2 years

Note

Hey!!! Hope you're well. It's very cold and wet here at the moment, so I though a Warm Tea, Chai Latte and Scented Candles would be fitting. :) <3

MY FRIEND!!!!! I am all right! A little headache-y but doing ok otherwise and at my friend's new cafe and vibing on this fine sunday!!! I hope you warm up dude you have my deepest sympathies it's about to rain all week here (and I am low-key looking forward to it all hail moody weather that makes it easier to write)

warm tea: what’s your favourite tea? if you don’t like tea, what’s your favourite drink?

Fave tea is Valerian tea. Have it daily lmao. But also I have vanilla lattes on the DAILY and I think I favor those more tbh

chai latte: your starbucks/coffee order?

Depends on the season and the energy, but I'm particularly fond of their Peppermint Mochas when they're in season, and in the spring/ summer I believe in Black/green tea lemonade supremacy. But the tried and true Starbucks standby for me is Iced Caramel Macchiato. My old friend from College. (oh also their cheese danishes and double smoked bacon sandwiches are the bomb I literally had one today)

And of course, other than my usual Vanilla Latte, when I'm at a REAL coffee place I usually get a Maple Latte (I think they're better iced but that's just me), or my new fave- Raspberry Mocha.

scented candles: do you enjoy reading? if so what’s your favourite book?

I do... sometimes. TBH I read more fanfic and screenplays and graphic novels and "Art Of" books and poetry than actual "books" but I'll run off some of my fave physical copies of things that I own:

Works Of Edgar Allan Poe: Fave Author Compendium. What can I say I'm a Gothic/romantic Lit Slut

Tolkien Reader: Fave Ref book- because god his essays are fascinating. And his translations of old poetry are really something else. Highly recommend the Tale of Welleran

Asterious Polyp- Favorite Graphic Novel of all time 100%

I Am The Messenger - Favorite book from High School

The Fountainhead - Favorite problematic book (bc lmao Ayn Rand was an awful person but oh my god I cannot get over her style and prose. Also the main character of this book is fucking hilarious to me he's so fucking faded I literally CRACK UP laughing reading this guy's dialogue)

Joker - Favorite Screenplay.

The Art of Tangled- Favorite Art Book. Look I love Encanto too and I just got my physical copy of the art book this week and I have yet to properly pour over it. But Glen Keane's sketches of all the main characters have yet to be topped for me personally. The concept art for this movie has inspired me so much the last 10 years and idk where I'd be as an artist without it.

The Art of Horror: The Making of Midnight Mass- Fave BTS book (obviously. It's got a lot of process points and industry stuff in it that really tickles me as a hopeful future filmmaker. And I get to salivate over Hamish Linklater to boot. Win-win.)

AESTHETIC ASKS

#ask games

1 note · View note

abandonedblog980 · 6 years

Text

30 Questions for Artists

I saw @saawek doing this and I didn’t get tagged but god I love these so much so i’m busting in and doing this

Rules: there are no rules! Tag whomever you want if you choose to answer the questions

Do you prefer traditional drawing, or digital? I feel like I get a more polished product out of digital, and it tends to look more like what I’m going for. So I’ll say digital : )

How long have you been drawing? basically always as a kid but you know, everyone scribbles when they’re a kid. I guess I started getting serious about art around 4th or 5th grade.

How many classes have you taken? required elementary ones, one optional middle school one, and two college courses (2D design and drawing I)

Do you have a DeviantArt, personal website, or art blog? right here : )

What’s your favorite thing to draw? probably Castiel.

What’s your least favorite thing to draw? uhhhhh feet

How often do you use references? basically every single day

Do you draw professionally, or just for fun? i’m actually just starting to come back to my (very casual) concept art job. it’s very rough but yeah

How much time do you spend drawing on an average day? maybe two hours or less? unless it’s a special occasion. i’ve been super busy with school.

Are you confident about your art? i’m the most confident with my art i’ve ever been. I still want to loosen up my painting and do more creative things but i’m slowly getting to it as it’s not too much of a priority now.

How many art-related blogs do you follow? I follow a lot of artists (especially of the supernatural type), but I follow a few ref and misc art blogs too

Is it okay for people to ask you about your process? I literally love posting process shots with portraits and if you ask me how I draw things it is the utmost honor.

Do you prefer to keep your art personal, or do you like drawing things for other people? if I think it’s kinda ugly, I might keep it to myself or just show it to my close friends in person. usually though, I absolutely love attention. oddly though i get uncomfortable when people gush over my art like it’s weird

Do you ever collaborate with others? i wish : (

How long does an average piece take you to complete? my digital portraits (or realistic busts or whatever) almost always take me 10+ hours. on paper though,

Do you draw more today than you did in the past, or do you draw less? definitely less. I used to doodle a lot in middle school, so now that I actually have to pay good attention, that’s gone.

Do you think you’re justified in giving other people art advice? i’ve taken a few art courses at college so kinda? I still feel like i’m presenting a pompous attitude when I give people my age/older than me advice.

What are you currently trying to improve on? being more creative, thinking outside the box, experimenting

What is the most difficult thing for you to draw? abstraction and legs

What is the easiest thing for you to draw? profile busts or front facing busts 😂

Do you like to challenge yourself? uhhhhh it’s really hard but it pays off so sure

Are you confident that you’re improving steadily? I hit a rut of no improvement or enjoyment after january that went on and off in february, and hit full force the first half of march, but now i’m finally starting to get consistent again.

Do you draw more fanart, or more original art? probably more art of my original characters lately. i haven’t shown it much though because they’re just small sketches.

Do you feel jealous when you see other people’s art, or inspired? (Be honest!) absolutely of course both. more inspired, but i’m lazy and barely ever act on it.

Do you like to draw in silence, or with music? I like music on as a lot of my actual drawings are inspired by songs, but I get distracted really easily. I also listen to a lot of YouTube but that’s even worse as you gotta keep clicking on new vids.

For digital artists: what program(s) do you use? Paint Tool Sai

For digital artists: how many layers does a typical piece require? hmmm on my last digital piece, I had one main layer and mostly drew on that, but when the brushes weren’t being cooperative or I wanted to ensure that I wouldn’t screw up the whole thing, I added a new layer on top and merged them later. probably less than 20 in the end?

For traditional artists: what medium do you like most? (Pencil, charcoals, etc) visually I love the look of oil paints and gouache, but i’ve never tried them out. of what I have, probably copic markers.

For traditional artists: How do you usually start on a big piece? (Light sketch, colored lead, sketchpaper, etc) I jump head first into it and pray

What inspires you to not just make art, but to be a better artist? absolutely my job as a concept artist. not sure how much I can say about that, but as someone who is the youngest in the company and one of the youngest in the industry, I’m constantly seeing my coworkers and others’ art. they’re all adults and they more about how art and the world works. and i wanna be up to par and speed with them.

i’m not really sure of which of my mutuals/followers are artists so just do this if you want!

#ask games #about me

3 notes · View notes

skarmorysilver · 7 years

Text

Now Taking Commissions!

As the title says, commissions are now open! Feel free to step right up and pay me for art, though remember to read the rules below first!

What I will draw:

Fakemon (duh!).

Pokémon-related things in general (Pokémon, items, locations, scenes, etc.).

Fantasy creatures and creature designs.

Animals in general, both living and extinct.

Fanart, as long as it's SFW, bonus points for if it's a fandom I'm familiar with.

Your OCs and OC concepts. This includes you or your persona, as long as you keep any reference images of yourself confidential so as to avoid accidental leakage of private information.

Single-subject pictures, or anything involving at most two subjects.

Weapons and items. Keep in mind that these are usually 3D-modeled and may take longer or shorter than usual to produce depending on how complex they are.

Logos and emblems.

General character artwork, scenes, etc.

What I'll consider drawing:

Group pictures. I've done pics with up to ten people before, but that's a very taxing endeavor. I'll generally be most comfortable with five subjects or less, especially for finished pics. Lineart or base color pics carry a little more leeway for me.

My OCs. I'm currently in the process of revising more or less all of my characters, and I haven't finalized any of them just yet; I'd rather hold off on doing artwork with them until I've done so. If I post a finalized design I'll also provide an indicator that yes, they can be used with my commission work, provided that you do the research regarding their characterization and acceptable scenarios involving them. Exceptions to this rule include my eligible PPC characters (I'll put up a list of them ASAP for reference) and characters whom I've adopted from other people.

Canon characters from continua I'm not familiar with. Please provide as much ref art as you can in such instances, so I can have a better reference pool for work featuring such characters.

Comics (four panels or less is fine, but more than that would require further discussion; no multi-page comics, period).

SFW anthro. I'm not interested in drawing NSFW anthro stuff, of course, but I've drawn vanilla anthro before and while I don't have as much interest in it as general creature design, I'm open to anthro commissions as long as you keep them family friendly.

Pics involving creature violence, up to and including gory battle scenes. Snuff artwork and mutilation of canon characters are exceptions to this possibility and fall under inflammatory artwork, though.

What I WON'T draw:

NSFW content in general - this is my (mostly) SFW account for a reason. I do have NSFW commission info but if you want a NSFW commission then you'll have to PM me for it so I can route the info to you. (As noted above, though, monster violence involving gore is a possible exception. It shouldn't be the main subject, though.)

Inflammatory subject matter, e.g. hate art. Whether it's directed towards canon characters or other real-life people doesn't matter, it's always off-limits. This also goes for offensive subject matter in general, e.g. anything that slanders religion, race, sexual orientation, politics, etc.

Anything to do with current events, e.g. political cartoons. This can potentially fall under inflammatory content as noted above.

Commission Directions

NOTE ME FIRST. Discussing ideas before putting them on paper is a very important step to getting a commission done. Please let me know what scenario you want, what characters, and whether or not you want lineart, base colors, etc.

BE SPECIFIC. Send me as much ref art as possible, and try to describe what you want for your scenario as much as you're able. This way I'll have a better idea of what to draw.

I only accept cash commissions at this time. As tempting as point commissions sound, I need the cash money right now and I'd rather be able to use my earnings for things.

If you want me to draw artwork featuring another person's characters, ask the other person first. This goes without saying - I don't want to have to draw a character without their owner's consent!

Once we get the details taken care of, I'll determine whether or not I'll be able to draw the commission, and send you my e-mail address if I am. Be ready to send the appropriate payment through PayPal as soon as possible; I won't start drawing until the payment is provided in full. Again, I reserve the right to refuse a commission if it doesn't abide by the above rules, but do be aware that I'm a very busy person, and I have to turn down a commission if I simply don't have the time or resources to create it.

When the work is finished, I'll let you know ASAP and we can discuss whether to post the pic or not. If you want to post it on your account, I'll send you the completed pic so you can do so, but otherwise I'll put it up on my DeviantArt and Tumblr accounts. If you don't want me to post the work publicly, let me know as soon as possible.

Tying to the above, if you want to share the finished work online yourself, DO NOT DISRESPECT MY CREATIVE EFFORTS. This includes failing to credit me or linking back to my dA account, removing my signature from the finished work, or claiming that you created the work and deserve all the credit for it. I've seen the front and back ends of too many kerfuffles over this matter, and my stance is clear on this matter: I, THE CREATOR OF THE WORK, AM ALSO THE LEGAL OWNER OF IT, AND ERASING ME FROM THE WORK OR OTHERWISE NOT CREDITING ME WHEN SHARING IT IS ILLEGAL AS WELL AS POOR CONDUCT. So if you think removing my signature when sharing something YOU PAID ME to create is a good idea, don't commission me at all.

Likewise, when it comes to my prices, WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET, PERIOD. Do not ask me to lower my prices, do NOT bargain with me regarding prices, and do NOT ask if you can hold off your payment until after I finish the work. Be aware that I'm in a less stellar position than I feel I should be in terms of savings money, so every penny counts towards keeping me being able to afford the things I need and want. I THEREFORE HAVE EVERY RIGHT TO REFUSE A COMMISSION IF THE EFFORT REQUIRED DOES NOT MATCH THE SUM YOU'RE OFFERING. That being said, if you're willing to change your offer to a cheaper commission type, e.g. a $15 lineart instead of a $20 color piece, please note me as soon as possible so I can adjust accordingly. I'm willing to take lower payments as long as you understand that this affects the outcome of the commission and as long as you keep the discussion civil.

I'm a SLOOOOOW drawer. Work, family, chores, and just plain old procrastination are all to blame for that. If you feel that I've unknowingly neglected a commission you paid for or which we've otherwise settled, please let me know as soon as possible and I'll add or re-add you to the commission to-do list for future reference. Or just remind me in general so I won't forget.

Prices

Standard Commissions:

Lineart: $15 (1 subject) + $5 per extra subject

Base Color, No Background: $20 (1 subject) + $10 per extra subject; $5 extra for shading

Finished Artwork (Fully shaded): $30 (1 subject) + $10 per extra subject; $10 extra for background

Special Commissions:

Fakemon: $10 per stage (i.e. a 3-stage line would cost $30); shiny colors are $2 extra. This pricing also goes for Mega Evolutions, regional variants, and form changes, which require their own separate artworks and count as separate "stages".

Character Concept Sheets: $20 (1 subject only). Additional fees for supplementary sketches may apply; feel free to talk to me about such extra material.

Logos, Emblems, and Sprite Work (transparent): $5 per subject or logo; $1 extra for sprite shading; alternatively, $20 for a Pokémon-style sprite sheet.

Literature: $50 (up to 10 pages on GDocs) + $10 per extra 5 pages. I have very little time for writing as it is, so I'll need a very good reason to write something for you! Any number of characters is fine, as long as they abide by the rules above.

That's all, folks! Here's to making a lot of good commissions in the future!

-SkarmorySilver

#commission info

5 notes · View notes

danisavin · 7 years

Photo

physical appearance & body concept

How is your characters appearance unlike their faceclaim's appearance?

OOC: So, I was in love with this ask from the start and instead of answering as merely an inbox response, I’ve elected to make this a proper headcanon. It’s long as fuck but includes cool arts (sort of) from me, and is probably worth a glance if your character knows Dani well in any capacity. Under read more for length. Tagging those whose characters would have direct knowledge of these details in some capacity (aka have seen dani at least half naked lol).

-- - @samuel-floros / @fanesavin / @nuadxa / @ianncardero / @teddyaynesworth (sort of??) / @lilo-el-lobo (thanks to parallel reality shenanigans) / @scarlettxruby (i’m counting skimpy coliseum outfits lol)

-- - basic dani stats vs. basic tatiana stats

age: twenty-six | thirty-one

height: 5′04″ | 5′04″

weight: 103 lbs *underweight | 116 lbs

body type: skinny, bony, slim musculature | slim, petite, ??

bra size: AA | B

eye color: golden amber | hazel

hair color: dark brown | dark brown

tattoos: various | no??

marks/scarring: various | ??

-- - physical characteristics body concept art *kcat did an art :3

I would recommend clicking this and opening it in a new tab so you can zoom in and get a better look at the details (tattoos and markings are obviously rough sketches, hair is also at its peak floofiness because hair is HARD so feel free to imagine it not so crazy thnx).

appearance of age:

-- - Dani’s features have always retained a sort of youthful (almost childish) gleam to them, regardless of the dark circles frequently present under their eyes and the numerous markings that dot their skin. They haven’t quite hit their peak maturity so far as facial features go.

height:

-- - Dani stands at a total of 5′04″, perhaps slightly under. However, their short height does not require them to purchase petite size clothing. Their body is of mostly average proportions, just smaller in overall size than most.

weight:

-- - Dani is slightly underweight for their height, weighing in at a total 103 lbs. This lower weight did not come about because Fane neglected to feed them as a child (in fact it was impossible for them to go hungry with his love for cooking), but because they burned tons of energy running around, yet never bothered to fully replenish the calories. Skipping meals was a regular practice simply because they believed their time was better spent doing something fun and exciting or important instead of eating. They were also somewhat prone to sickness in their youth, which may or may not have also contributed to this aspect.

body type:

-- - Dani has a short, rectangular, skinny, and bony body (see best ref here) with slim musculature and a pale complexion. They have hardly any extra meat on them, if at all. At prominent points such as their hips, ribs, and collarbone, you’ll be able to see the outline of bones beneath their skin – nothing extreme, but enough to highlight that they’ve fallen just below the healthy weight line for their stature. This has also played a part in Dani’s breast size. On the rare occasion that Dani wears an actual bra, its a AA size bra. They usually wear sports bras not because they have to but because, so long as they’re not going bare-chested (which they do from time to time), sports bras provide all the support they need and pair nicely with their preferred boxer-briefs. Additionally, Dani is an avid fan of swordplay, martial arts, and yoga. This high level of activity has left them with a solid basis of musculature. It’s not like they’re boasting a six-pack, but it’s also not hard to spot the lines that indicate where they’ve got a little more than just skin over bone.

skin type:

-- - Dani’s skin is pale -- like bordering on mistaken vampire pale -- thanks to their preferably nocturnal schedule. While they love trips to places such as Egypt, sunscreen is a must for them. But they can hardly stand the stuff, so they like to stay out of the sun as much as possible. Their skin is soft to the touch where it hasn’t been scratched, scarred, or burnt and is speckled with a great assortment of marks from their many misadventures.

eye color:

-- - Dani’s eyes are technically classified as amber; however, lighting and mood play a large part in their eye color at any particular moment, and generally speaking their eyes tend more toward a golden hue than they do the red and orange tones of standard amber cases. as Scully in the voice of Ruby @scarlettxruby so beautifully put it, Dani’s eyes “look like honey dipped in sunlight,” which while a bit on the poetic side, is still rather accurate. Honey gold is great way to describe Dani’s regular eye color – not purely golden but not as sharp as yellow either, and again, light plays a big role in their appearance. There will be times that their eyes come off as more truly amber or even a brownish color, but these a rare instances and don’t necessarily bode well for the present situation. But whatever the case, you can bet they have a solid base of eyeliner outlining their intense stare (it’s practically permanent at this point). Dani has a considerable darkness about them, so I wanted them to have one solid physical feature that could be a consistent reminder that no matter how dark they feel they are, there’s still light in them somewhere, and having such bright eyes that tend to sparkle in the light when they’re excited felt like the perfect fit. example one / example two / example three / example four

hair color & style:

-- - SO HAIR. We all know that Dani and Sam are local curly hair royalty (jk but also not ok it’s insane), but in comparison of the two, Dani is the one known for their unruly and wild curls. Well, the curls happen when their hair is wet or untouched (or treated by Sam); when they attempt to brush through their hair, it ends up its everyday wavy-curly mess. When their hair isn’t dyed, its color ranges from dark brown to black. It’s been cut short for the summer and left to be as curly as it pleases, but throughout the year it may lengthen, and when it does, it often becomes more wavy than curly. current shortness / mid-length / long / long and curly

hands & nails:

-- - Like Dani’s bony frame, their fingers are also thin and bony. They have slightly longer than average fingers with short, pointed nails that are frequently painted with matte black polish. The back of their hands are smooth like much of their skin, but on their fingers and their palms you will find rougher, tighter patches that have developed over years of work in the field. The soles of their feet also share in this tightness due to a buildup of tolerance for running barefoot.

tattoos & markings:

-- - Dani has lots of tattoos and it’s unlikely that they’re going to stop getting them anytime soon. You can find images of their current tattoos here and placement/sizing on the concept art above.

-- - Dani also has lots of scars. Most of these I don’t have specific headcanons for, so a number of them I’ve randomly filled in on the concept art. Those that are canon markings have come from in-game injuries or past injuries hinted at and mentioned through headcanons or threads. A few of these include the scarring on their back, the claw wound on their upper left arm, the small bullet wound down at their right hip, the scratchy patches and scars on their knees and elbows (from childhood as well as modern mischief), and the scratch above their right eye and on their left cheek.

everyday appearance:

-- - I’m literally just going to leave some of my favorite Dani (aka Tatiana/Sarah Manning) gifs and images here, but do keep in mind that their hair currently shorter than what these images imply.

001 / 002 / 003 / 004 / 005 / 006 / 007 / 008 / 009 / 010 / 011 / 012 -- i like to think of this one as their prof look

#( answ. )#( hc. )#( cd. )#important.#this is why all my replies are late you guys #i have been OBSESSING over this #im sorryyyy

5 notes · View notes

pastelsketches64 · 7 years

Photo

Welcome to Sketches of the Month: June!

Well, this was definitely an interesting month; for more reasons than just my art, but I won’t get onto that stuff here. We’re all here to see the art hopefully! And indeed, I was the productive plush this month; and I would like to say that I’m quite enjoying the direction my art is going, if y'all don’t mind me speaking my mind. I’ve been experimenting with many different factors of my art; such as characterisation, emotion, expression and colour. And I feel like I’ve at least succeeded in some regard to these intentions!

But enough with the introductions now; let’s get on to the pictures themselves, shall we?~

——————————————————————-

Picture 1: Two Player Game!

Yes, the Boyf is back! This was drawn right at the beginning of June, and I’ll admit my obsession with BMC has been toned down considerably to a light admiration; so I don’t have as much artwork pertaining to it. But I still really liked this sketch of them as the Mario Bros, even if I never finished it like I wanted to XD

——————————————————————-

Picture 2: We found one!

Hey, remember back to last month’s SotM (Sketches of the Month) with that pic of me and Silver with the chaos emerald? Yep, I finished it off here, and my god did it turn out amazing! I mean, I feel it turned out amazing. This picture reached a level of detail, colour and atmosphere that I hadn’t reached before then, and it was definitely a pivotal moment for me this month! I swear, I’m not even quite sure how I drew this XD

——————————————————————-

Picture 3: Moment of Music

This was also a sketch that was on last month’s SotM; and while it’s still a simple concept, I still feel like I excelled at experimenting with a softer and, dare I say, pastel colour scheme XD I’ve really noticed how much I love colours and how my brain seems to respond to them; especially when it comes to remembering things! I do indeed have that ukulele as well, sparkles and all XD

——————————————————————-

Picture 4 & 5: I really like 06…

Ok, now that I’ve said that publicly, these are some screenshot redraws that I did after I saw some other artists try their hand at the idea. I immediately went to 06, as I knew my intense focus on character and emotion would be a pretty appropriate combination; as 06’s character models were definitely not the best at conveying any emotion at all if we’re being honest here XD

——————————————————————-

Picture 6: Give them a chance to be happy…

Finished on the 23rd of June; this was basically my 26th anniversary picture for the franchise and the 16th anniversary for Sonic Adventure 2! I started the picture a day after my birthday, which was on the 20th of June, and was mainly attempting to experiment with the new markers that I got.

I was intrigued when I got the main idea for the piece sketched out, as I came to outline the picture with this shape that I’m not sure has a name??? XD Either way, I hoped I was able to convey Shadow’s story well through the picture, for his story was and still is some of the franchise’s best writing; and I can only hope for the best, story and all, in Sonic Forces!

——————————————————————-

Picture 7: *Gasp* I HAVE OCS??!!!

Yes, I am just as surprised my dear followers, but I have somehow miraculously created my own original characters! It’s a stunning feat, I know, but how’s about I stop this degrading talk about myself and actually explain these characters to y'all?

Well, Adabelle is quite the musical geek, and does aspire to join musical theatre professionally despite her fear of performing on stage. She is a quiet girl who stays to herself a lot, and while smart academically, she is usually awkward and nervous socially. She also has a slight fear of water, mainly only shown when near a large body of water or when out in the rain.

Now Layla can be considered similar to Adabelle with her limited social interactions, but she differs as she is more then willing to engage in conversation if someone else provokes it first. She tends to get competitive while playing practically any video game, even when there is seemingly nothing to challenge. Because of an event that she doesn’t speak of, she moved school and eventually became close friends with Adabelle; who she eventually confided in with her secret.

——————————————————————-

Picture 8: Chao are utterly adorable!

I believe this was also another sketch from last month, but I can’t recall at the moment. I’m still planning on doing a full background for it, but since the end of the month was coming up, I hastily made a background so I could make the picture transparent. This was another experiment with colouring, and I even drew myself wearing different clothes! *GASP* It's a miracle! I don’t smell anymore! XD JK, but yeah, I came up with a ‘Sonic’ design I guess you could call it; and I will probably do a ref sheet for it soon!

——————————————————————-

Well, I hope you enjoyed reading this everyone! I know I always write a lot here, but I truly appreciate it if you actually read through it all somehow XD I just always have a lot that I can say about my art, and I want everyone to know about it if they’re going to see my art already. I’m always up for questions in my ask box, or even if you just want to talk about something, I’m up for it!

8 notes · View notes

tumblunni · 7 years

Photo

Ah, here’s the pillowsnake! It’s called Rashab, I totally forgot!

beware, like 40 paragraphs of long rambling about the game below:

I never realized how the naming schemes actually work. All the different variants of a particular genus share a name ending- Nushab is the weird 8 shaped long neck snake, Rashab is the super rectangular chubby one, and Mukshab is the sticklike one that just looks like a real snake but with the trademark weird head that this monster has. And then the sub-breeds of each sub-breed have a totally different naming scheme! Only the main Rashab is Rashab, the other three elementals are all something-moaj instead. And Nushabs are something-oots, and Mukshabs are something-mines. Its an interesting way to do it, though it’s pretty hard to actually figure any of it out ingame when all the pure sub-breed forms only appear as enemies and you’re gonna be fusing your own variations for your party. I think pretty much anything fuses well with the snakes, they look awesome with any texture! And when they fuse with bugs they can actually gain lil wings and look like Dunsparce!

OH OH OH and ALSO I love how monsters in this game actually grow up! Like, they dont evolve, they just grow up like actual animals! They have very very subtle model changes in size for the first 20 or 30 levels, to symbolise reaching maturity. Its hard to even notice it happening unless you compare save files! And often you’ll be fusing monsters rather than keeping them in your party for a long time anyway. So I’m glad that the Shabs have some of the more noticeable changes! Their baby selves start off looking a lot more similar, and they only gain their giant variation in body shapes when they’ve matured. (Though you can still tell what one its gonna become)

OH AND ALSO ALSO The shabs look even cuter in the concept art, yo!!! Ingame it maybe loses a bit of the appeal cos of the low resolution and how everything is textures rather than model detail. (A necessity considering how the fusion system works, yknow?) On the concept art their faces look less like an eyeless snake with dot patterns, and more like a snake with eight buglike eyes. ITS REALLY CUTE!! Thats why I said they look like leeches! Cos they have the super light coloured undersides and the three-pronged jaw and the bug eyes! They’re scaly big leeches! they’re leechly small snakes! THEYRE THE BEST OF MY TWO FAVOURITE LONG ANIMALS!!!!

OH AND its good worldbuilding but I’M SAD The shabs The shabs get the honor of being in the worldbuilding in A SAD WAY The basic MP restoration item is called a Shab Liquer :( Yeah, its nice to know that they thought about how these magical monsters might be a part of everyday life even outside of a battle setting. But its sad to think about how they’re killed and used in medicine! And you have to use hundreds of this medicine, there’s no way to survive without MP restores! I DONT WANNA MAKE MY SNAKE FRIEND A CANNIBAL Tho I do appreciate how the name Shab Liquer just implies a lot of worldbuilding on its own. Like, you don’t just know that they make a medicine from the snakes, its implied its quite literally a snake oil. Like, does that mean snake oil is an idiom for a totally reliable and true thing in this universe? And Liquer is just a rather archaic and fancy way to phrase it, it fits very well with the setting! But seriously WHY DO I HAVE TO FEED MY SNAKE BABY DEAD SNAKE BABIES TO KEEP THEM ALIVE

OH OH OH AND that reminds me of another Fucked Up aspect of the worldbuilding! Your most reliable way of gaining money in this game is selling the monsters you catch. Which is dumb and impractical anyway cos I mean YOU WANNA FUSE THEM ALL!! And you get more money from selling your ones that you actually already fused and levelled up, like NO WAY am I doing that! I love them!! Even if I’m not using them, I’m just gonna keep them at home with Mahbu! NO MAKE ME SELL MY SNEKS But the REALLY FUCKED UP PART is that its explicitely said that by selling them you are killing the monsters.

...Okay so.. this kinda needs some explanation of more of the worldbuilding first...

The way you catch monsters in this game is by using magical cocoons, hence the name of the story. Monsters are meant to be like spiritual creatures, they’re called Minions cos they’re literally the minions of this setting’s deity, Elrihm. The religion of this culture states that humanity (or ‘The Beasts Of Knowledge’) committed a great sin in the past. We were god’s attempt to grant free will and intelligence to animals, but we used it to do evil and he decided the whole species was beyond saving because of the actions of a few. So he created these monsters/demons/avenging angels in snake form, and their mission in life is to destroy all of humanity so that the world can be reset. Which is why minions attack humans on sight, yet coexist perfectly peacefully with animals and plants in the forest. So like... humanity obviously Did Not Want to all die for the sins of one or two dumb kings, yknow? We stubbornly persist! We hold out our vanguard and keep our little towns amidst the Doom Forests, living life as normal with just the Doom Forests being a thing in the background, yeah. Defending against occasional attacks of minions banding together into swarms and chewing on the walls a little, but yeah, no biggie. And sometimes one of them manages to get in and eat some of our garbage or something. People live normally in these fortified wall villages, and the religion still worships Elrihm, and revolves around begging his forgiveness and trying to prove that humanity deserves to live. And never advancing too far with industrialism. lest we be punished again! And I mean, maybe that actually IS how everything happened, or maybe its just a story and Minions have always existed as a natural part of the ecosystem and they’re not evil things destined to destroy us or whatever. Its ambiguous! Even when you get to see Elrihm’s avatar at the end of the game, it’s just a big magical tree that the monsters come from, you never get any idea if it’s sentient and you’re not able to ask it if our legends have the right idea about it’s role as god. (Or if its gender is actually male, or if it even has one XD)

Anyway, that’s the legend of where the monsters come from, and it kinda explains why people might be a bit callous towards them, if they can be tamed as cute friends but also the wild ones are such a big threat to civilization. And if mythology says their threat to civilization is the natural order of existance, that they exist to kill us under orders of a god who abandoned us centuries ago... But yeah! Anyway! There’s a bloodline of magical people called the Nagi who have the power to purify the anger out of minions and make them friends. And the game has a cool way of keeping the usual mons show aspect of ‘catch a monster inside a certain item that has a limited amount of uses’, while making it fit with this ancient times mythological setting! Instead of the pokeball equivelant being some sort of manmade machine, it’s... cocoons! Since Minions are spiritual creatures, they can be like.. de-manifested and have their souls stored, to be re-summoned later. And for whatever reason, the way the magic works is that their souls have to be contained in cocoons. It’s... actually never fully explained? Where do the cocoons come from? Is it like you take any cocoon from a regular bug, and you seal the monster soul inside? But how would you even get an EMPTY cocoon? Is there a special bug in this universe that makes cocoons not for metamorphosis? or do you like.. fuse the soul with the bug inside the cocoon, and thats why all the monsters in this game are inspired by bugs? But they have the same bug-inspired designs even when you find them in the wild before catching them. So is it like the Nagi magic can create magical cocoons and you use those? or is it like you dont actually carry the empty cocoons, you carry something or other that turns into cocoons when a monster is sealed inside it? the catching animation is very vague, the protagonist is only holding his magic flute and a nebulous white glow in his hand. Then the cocoon forms around the monster and its sucked into his hand... ANYWAY I’M GOING OFFTOPIC SORRY! The point is that Nagi people can purify minions into friends, fuse minions into new powerful forms and (probably?) create the magic cocoons that can catch them in the first place. But it doesn’t mean that Nagi people are actually equipped to fight and catch the monsters themselves! the usual setup is a married couple where the Nagi can stay at home and focus entirely on their magic, and the regular human partner learns warrior arts and catches the monsters for them. Also catching monsters requires magic music, so you need to be a damn good bard too! I liked that they even showed that different Cocoon Masters (official name for peeps like the protag) can use whatever instruments fit best with their soul. The protagonist has an ocarina and [important endgame character] has a fancy lute guitar thing? I wish the game had told me what those are called... I think a name for an ancient japanese string instrument is a shamisen but i have NO IDEA if the one shown ingame is actually that or there are more different ones..? I mean its only shown in cutscnes so there’s no good ref image for it- I’M GOING OFFTOPIC AGAIN Anywaaaaaayyyy, its also in the worldbuilding that (for some reason) Nagi men are unable to use magic, and thats why the mages are always the wives and the warriors are always the husbands. Its interesting how this mythology is kinda presented as an opposite of adam and eve, too! Men who try and use magic are sinful and will be punished for stepping out of their assigned roles by becoming demons. Its the sad story of the protagonist’s parents, alas! His mother was the previous Nagi priestess of the village, but her husband committed the ultimate sin and then all we know is that his corrupted self fled into the forest and was never seen again. And everyone marks you as a failure for what your father did, so becoming the new cocoon master is quite hard at first. And its SUPER DUPER SAD cos your dad did it because performing minion purification is painful for the Nagi, and he couldn’t bear to see his wife hurting herself for his sake. So even though he knew the risks, one day he just tried to purify his minions himself so she could get some rest. And.. like.. ultitmately it did work. Cos she could never bear to remarry, and thus the village didnt have another cocoon master until their son grew old enough to marry. At least he succeeded in letting his wife never have to do magic again, even if it was because she stopped doing it out of grief for him.. :(

ANYWAY Now i’ve explained that worldbuilding and why it is cool and awesome and sad, I can explain the worldbuilding of a random gameplay element and why it is also cool and sad! So yeah, like I said before LONG TANGEANTS... The only really reliable way to make money in the game is to sell your monsters. And it makes me feel SO BAD! Cos the game very much outright tells you that selling them is killing them. And I guess it makes sense cos I mean, only Nagi wife-husband pairs can actually summon the monsters, there’d be no point trying to sell living ones to anyone else. So, since minions are sealed inside cocoons, in order to sell them you spin their cocoons into silk thread. This village’s primary export is weaving, so you can sell these silk spools to the big ol building of spinning wheel people and make money to keep going on your journey. Apparantly silk infused with monster souls is higher quality and can grant various effects and stuff, hence its value. Its a shame they didnt make a crafting system with this! Instead its just a standard ‘more powerful weapons and armours appear at the shop as the plot advances, for no real reason’. I mean, wouldnt it have been cool if you could add your monsters’s particular resistances to your main character’s armour? i would feel less sad about betraying them so utterly if they could protect me from beyond the grave. BECAUSE SERIOUSLY THIS IS SO FUCKED UP Seriously! These monsters faithfully served you! You purified them of their anger against humans, and instead of taking that opportunity to love them and show them the good sides of humanity, you just kill them! You kill them after they gained free will! You specifically HAVE to give them free will in order to kill them! Poor babies... I mean seriously I know that animals have to die to provide humans with food and materials and stuff, this is just how society works. But there’s something so much more viscerally terrifying about imagining taking an animal and literally weaving its SOUL into thread, then wearing it! There’s so many metaphysical questions that need to be answered before you can even figure out how much pain they would experience! And like.. god.. even the way they do the gameplay is so.. even more sad. Like, you can’t just hand the monster to someone else and its implied that they kill them. You have to hit an actual button to turn it into a sellable item. You have to cull it yourself. The death blow is on your hands, even if someone else weaves its dead soul into a nice scarf... So yeah, I pretty much always deliberately play ‘hard mode’ on this game, and refuse to make any damn money. Well, I mean, you can still find items in forests and sell them, but its infinately harder that way. You really are supposed to be selling your monsters to progress. I SAY NO! Big ol giant interface option sitting there on the menu unused forever. I love my sneks. You will not take them!!!

Oh but MAN I do really like the moral ambiguity of this worldbuilding, aaaaa!! The whole setting is so.. like.. realistic. There’s the dark realities of life in an ancient times setting. They take care to establish how the society functions and what their main trading export is, and what role monsters play in a non-battley setting! And seriously even the lil Shab Liquer thing! The casual implication that other villages might have different industries with their captured monsters, and someone somewhere out there found a way to make this medicine out of snakes. it manages to imply a wider world even as you’re confined to this one single village and the long forest that divides it away from every other human settlement. Plus.. like.. I really like the ambiguity it gives to HUMANITY. That seems like the MOST realistic of anything! Seriously, the game starts off establishing that in mythology humans are said to be evil, that the creation myth says we’re living in a post-fall society as the corrupted form of what true humanity should actually be, that god has abandoned us and we follow religion because we have to prove ourselves good enough to regain our former status. Like.. seriously, its refreshing compared to how boring and samey a lot of fictional religions are! They’re often just copies of existing religions, or of the general most popular religion template of There Was One Or Two Creator Gods And They Made Humans And Humans Are Destined Important And Animals Were Made To Serve Us. Instead in this game humanity’s mistreatment of animals and the environment is our absolute sin, and the definition of holiness is to be more similar to animals. And big scary demon monsters are GOD’S HOLY CREATIONS, SENT TO PUNISH US! No stereotypes here! No corner-cutting bullshit stolen from real life religions! And then like.. its nice how ambiguous it makes humanity nowadays, even beyond the ambiguity of the mythology and history. Humanity is trying to redeem itself, humanity is following this religion worshipping the god that cast them down for being corrupted. But still, it shows that some people believe in this doctrine, and some people believe that the things that are ‘corrupt’ about us are actually good. Cos it shows how some people believe that like.. ALL progress is sinful, any sort of machine is sinful, any attempt to improve society or change on what’s traditional. And it shows how some people who believe this are the bad guys, and some people believe this in a way that actually makes sense. And similarly, some people who follow the traditional ways are good- like Mahbu and her grandma. But then there’s the village chief who just follows religion blindly and doesnt seem to actually understand what’s morally correct at all, he’s just like ‘if I do what I’m told, I’ll be freed!’ instead of getting the goddamn lesson. And he tries to pretend to be a reasonable authority figure at first but then he gets more and more corrupt as the game goes on. He’s the representation of how forcing our two heroes into an arranged marriage is a morally ambiguous thing, even though they actually were in love and would have got hitched anyway. They’re still way too young to get this destiny of being the only ones who can save the village, AND keep the economy alive by spinning poor lil monsters into silk! And then he keeps giving you more and more orders, and they go from the actual duties of a cocoon master into just fullfilling the chief’s own greed and paranoia. And its interesting that him and the vizier lady who represents ‘lets abandon the rules and do everything for the benefit of humanity’ actually end up teaming up in the end and becoming even more goddamn corrupt together. Excessive progress and excessive stagnancy are both evil, and honestly they both have very similar selfish motives! Tho I do think the only problem is that they put a bit too much emphasis on this whole ‘these two looked like reasonable authority figures but were really evil’ thing, and don’t have enough good people in the town representing the other side. So its harder to care about saving this place when its literally just your wife and your mom who represent the goodness of the human race. And like.. technically I dont want the asshole lil kid to die, cos even though he’s a jerk he’s too young to be 100% responsible for his own actions. Even if I dont like him as a person, I’d still rather wanna take him away from this trash town and hope he can get raised by better people...

But seriously goddamn THOSE FUCKIN ASSHOLE CHIEFTAIN AND VIZIER PEOPLE!! Even after me and mahbu just saved the city from a deadly disease, after like 12 hours of gameplay and three forests worth of fighting for my life against monsters, where I’m expected to have sacrificed like 30 monsters to feed their stupid fuckin silk industry, even after ALL THAT they show no gratitude! The opposite of gratitude! The chief is still paranoid of the Nagi people for being foreigners, even though they dedicate their whole damn life to leaving their families and going on journeys to settle down in different cities and give their power to protect un-magic humans. And they’ve been doing this for all of history despite persecution, and like.. they lost their home and now the only ones who exist are the nomads and various half-nagi children who’ve never seen anyone of their own race before and are losing all the culture. Mahbu is an orphan who was just found by her ‘grandma’ and raised here, the only other Nagi in the village are the protagonist’s mum and technically the protagonist is half Nagi. (Tho like I said, the worldbuilding is that men cant use the magic, so protagonist is classified as a regular human and would just pass it on if he had a daughter.) So seriously Mahbu is a GODDAMN ORPHAN who was raised here all alone and hated by the village even as a kid! And the protagonist was her only childhood friend cos he could understand the feeling of being hated for having this blood, so no wonder they ended up falling in love. And then their love is at risk cos they were forced into this political marriage when they’re really young, and now have to risk dying everyday to protect this town that still hates them. And they work so hard to prove they don’t deserve to be hated, they don’t even think ‘the town is assholes’, they think ‘this is my home and i love it and it must be my fault everyone hates me so i have to work harder’. And the game doesn’t give you any option to do otherwise!

And it progresses even worse than just not getting gratitude! After you save the village from the disease, the evil chief and vizier wreck the day that you just saved, by pulling their goddamn bullshit evil plan! The chief decides to cut down the god-tree because of his paranoia, the vizier decides to cut down the god-tree because of her greed. And like... GAHHHH but its SO GOOD cos its all moral ambiguity still! The evil duo are definately evil, but they get to be evil for different reasons. They represent the two darkest sides of humanity, and no matter how much you represent the light of the world you cannot change them just by passively obeying them and hoping they’ll react like goddamn rational people! But you can understand why the masses might be tricked into following them, yknow? Humanity has been living in this tough life for as long as human memory, and mythology says that we’re being punished for the sins of our ancestors and we’re just BORN EVIL even though we weren’t the ones who did that shit. So you have good reasons to be angry against god, even if the evil duo DONT have good reasons, and they’re not doing something that will actually help.

Anyway so yeah thusly they trick mahbu and the protagonist into helping them trap the god-tree so they can cut it down. Again its a lil annoying that the game doesn’t give you a choice, though! And they dont even bother writing it a bit more ambiguous so the player could be fooled too, its pretty damn obvious you’re being tricked yet the only way to progress the game is to keep going. So you accidentally end up casting the evil magic on the god-tree and its like HOLY SHIT NO! And as you run back to the town you cant get back in time to stop anything, and you just get to see cutscenes of what’s happening while you’re gone. The evil duo cross the line EVEN FURTHER by MURDERING MAHBU’S GRANDMA! Mahbu’s grandma is the BEST CHARACTER, you fucking fuckface! She was such a nice helpful mentor and one of the only people who genuinely treated you two like human beings even though she wasn’t related to you. And she tries to stop the evil duo from doing their evil plan, she tries to reason with them, and she even gets desperate enough to try and reason with them within their own logic. Even if they’re sacriligious and selfish enough to not care that they’re trying to kill god for personal gain, they should at least understand that their plan WON’T FUCKIN WORK, and they’re just gonna bring god’s wrath and ruin humanity’s only chance at redemption! You’re gonna lose all your goddamn money and power if you get bitchslapped by the heavens, dumbass! AND you;ll kill the rest of us too, who never did anything to deserve it! And they ignore all her attempts to be reasonable, and ritually sacrifice her to try and save their own asses once their stupid attempt to kill god backfires. FUCK YOU TWO, SERIOUSLY!

And then something I really like is the revelation of grandma’s backstory! Cos seriously, who exactly was this mysterious woman who found this orphan and rescued her from the forest? She wasn’t a citizen of this town, she just stayed here to raise Mahbu once the town residents acted like assholes and tried to kick the poor kid back out. It turns out that grandma is actually the mortal incarnation of one of the minor deities! She’s basically this world’s psychopomp. The evil duo were actually RIGHT when they said she was a demon in disguise, but NOT when they thought that she was the evil one and they were good. The psychopomp figure of this mythology is hated, but it seems to be that she gained that reputation because she disobeys Elrihm and tries to help humans. She saved this Nagi girl from dying like the rest of her people, and even bound herself in human form in order to try and redeem this town of jackasses. And even though she was part of their village for so long and did nothing but try and protect them, they still ultimately betrayed her... And it was a very vague plot element that was only casually mentioned here cos its Endgame Time and we have to move very fast now. But it was implied that the chief and vizier are the reincarnations of the original evil king and evil sorcerer who did the same sinful nonsense all those centuries ago to get humanity kicked out of god’s domain in the first place. I dunno if its just meant to be that they’re naturally stuck in a cycle of reincarnation as punishment for their sins? But I always liked to interpret it that psychopomp grandma chose to never take their souls, because no matter what they do to her she still believes that one day they might be able to be redeemed in their next life. I feel like maybe she’s gambling with god, she’s keeping humanity alive by holding this one last wager to prove that they’re worth saving...

And then spoily endgame stuff happens and ultimately the protagonist fullfills some ancient prophecy and calms god and etc and MAKES UP FOR THE BULLSHIT ADULTS RUINING ALL THE SHIT, SERIOUSLY And seriously i haaaate how abrupt and rushed the ending is, and how that in this abrupt rushed ending they had time to show that the trash town comes back to life but not show that Mahbu does! You’re told beforehand that she will, but like.. with how many times you get lied to in this game, it would have been nice to get some damn confirmation in the end. Plus seriously, I cant even be happy seeing the town come back! Thats not a very climactic ending! Seeing protagonist smooch his poor long-suffering girlfriend would be way better! Seriously SERIOUSLY everyone else fuckin died cos of their own fuckin fault cos they MURDERED A GRANDMA my nice sweet ETERNAL GRANDMA, the ANCIENT DEITY OF ALL GRANDMAS, the fuckin DEATH GOD SATAN FIGURE WHO SACRIFICED HERSELF TO BECOME A GRANDMA AND PROTECT US AND THEN THEY KILLED HER, AAAAA they fuckin deserved to all die and be frozen in stone unable to even find peace But Mahbu’s life was instead in danger because she used too much magic purifying monsters IN ORDER TO SAVE THE DAMN TRASH TOWN And after all that they had the goddamn gall to be ungrateful and just cause a second disaster and ask us to fix it again! THAT is why mahbu was gonna die! Because she was a good person who listened to your bullshit and tried to save you, and loved me, and just SERIOUSLY SO MANY EMOTIONS you repayed her by KILLING HER GRANDMA

And i mean seriously her form of death was quite literally death from being TOO HOLY AND MORAL. She wasn’t strictly ‘dying’, it was more like a death of personality, I guess? Becoming something holy and leaving this world, when she didnt want to leave you. Everyone called the painful Nagi markings ‘cursed’ and shamed her for it and made her cover them up so their poor goddamn eyes wouldnt be offended by having to look at them. And poor mahbu was worried her goddamn love of her life would be disgusted with her if he saw! So it was like.. simultaneously cathartic and sad to learn that tradition was wrong in this respect. That it was still a BAD THING, but it was holy markings instead of a curse. Nagi priests who succum to the ‘curse’ are just shedding their humanity as a reward for their service, because from Elrihm’s perspective this is a good thing. So Mahbu becomes a tiny fairy angel type Minion, and then its just sad and intense because soon she’ll lose the ability to speak and forget about you and grandma :( So you have to seal her inside a cocoon in order to halt the spread of the holy markings, and can only let her out to talk to her for very short amounts of time in case it starts up again. And then you have to face the gauntlet of the penultimate dungeon alone without the ability to fuse monsters, until you get through it and find the original Nagi hometown whose demise was greatly exaggerated. And then nobody there has any time for character development cos its endgame time, but seriously it was thematically really damn cathartic to walk through that door and see the place! And meet this actual good guy chieftain who actually finally answers some goddamn questions and helps you! Even if its super sad to have to do fusion with these new stranger shopkeeper twins, instead of the wife you’ve grown to love. And also SERIOUSLY just imagine how fuckin atmospheric that whole penultimate dungeon would have been if the player character got to have a voice! It was all atmospheric to me cos I got really into it and imagined it, but I wish it coulda been canon, yknow? I’m just imagining the poor protagonist dude fighting through this horrifying gauntlet all alone with his final team of monsters, struggling to keep up without any of the magical reinforcement they usually get, unable to restock the last few items he has left in his bag. Fuckin DESPERATE HORROR, fuckin having to sleep overnight in the forest for the first time, fuckin terrified. Fuckin.. clinging to the soul of his wife sealed in a cocoon, keeping it safe against all costs, fuckin wakes up in the middle of the night and just how terrified he’d be that he can’t find her, until he remembers what happens T_T And then like.. imagine him summoning her and only getting a few minutes to hold her tiny fragile fairy self in the palm of his hands, and strain to hear her quiet voice as it gets fainter and fainter, and she struggles to remember herself. Thats somehow EVEN SADDER than if you could actually use monster-Mahbu in your party to fight alongside you! (tho that would have been AWESOME) I felt so bad that after all the horror these two had to go through, we never get to see the happy ending they earned, and instead the game wastes time showing the trash town coming back and just... GAHHH

oh and also that is THE ONLY THING about the sequel that i agree is bad! I liked the sequel a lot! And.. I mean.. in theory its a very interesting concept to have the protagonist of the last game be this sadman morally ambiguous broken mentor man. But seriously fuckin hell give the man a break! They literally say that he got blessed/cursed with immortality cos he fullfilled the prophecy in the first game, so Mahbu died long ago and he desperately wants to die too. Thats such a fuckin sick thing to do to your protagonist! And I mean, he doesnt even look like the same person anymore, and so much about the gameplay and the setting and etc are wildly different so it doesnt seem like the same world in th future, why even bother trying to claim its the same world in the future... I mean even.. monsters come from eggs instead of cocoons now, and you cant catch them or merge them, only buy them in stores! Shoulda just made it a separate game and let it stand on its own merits, it would have actually succeeded. I love all the characters in JC2, there’s no problem of ‘man i dont wanna save these guys’, the only character I dont like is fuckin... SADMAN FORMER PROTAGONIST WHO WANTS TO DIE At least in the ending after spoily stuff he gets to pass away. But lets just say the spoily stuff spits on the poor man’s legacy even more, sheesh...

ANYWAY I FEEL A LOT OF EMOTIONS FOR PROTAGONIST AND MAHBU And this game has great worldbuilding and i love it even if the ending is rushed and you’re forced to fall for stupid villain assholes’s stupid tricks ok end of bunni’s rambling

#bunni original vintage post

2 notes · View notes