Hi! I'm an estonian freelance cartoonist. This is my drawings and other arts blog. This artist is anti-AI and anti-NFT.
linktree · instagram· artstation
the use of AI lately has made me feel so hopeless, i translated pages of an unfinished fanzine of mine so i can remember why i love art...i hope it can resonate with anyone feeling the same way
❤️🤞Starting off our TRIGUN Reanimate ARTIST SPOTLIGHTS with @puppyprotag ! Get a glimpse into their Behind the Scenes with cleanup, rough animation and lovely compositing that brings these two shots together! The style and color choices are really unique and lovely!!
TRIGUN REANIMATED Backup Applications to be opening again soon. Stay tuned ‼️
remembered gradient presents in krita yesterday (from Filters>Map>Gradient Map) and hey… these aint half bad.
(from the Game Nights organized at Tallinn University)
caption: three thumbnails depicting the same flier for "Game Night", but in 3 different color schemes, chronologically from right to left: red+black, red+yellow and a custom set of red+yellow overlayed with some blue
for those curious to try these out too, the names are:
- GPS Fire Life Span
- GPS Fire Incandescent
(and then some alternating overlay and color? layers for the last one)
Going to add something here as a few people in the notes don't know the significance of the date here, or think this might be a dig at Sesame Street somehow - on November 18th, 2003, there was an absolutely landmark legal case in the state of Massachusetts that ruled that civil unions in that state needed to be given the same rights as marriage. This was HUGE - gay marriage was not legally recognized in any state at the time, and civil unions were the closest you could get. This is a WONDERFULLY hopeful, sweet comic drawn five whole days after an enormous, major step forward for gay marriage POSSIBLY being legal. Massachusetts wouldn't even properly legalize gay marriage until May 2004, and it was the first state to do so.
You can Google Goodridge v Department of Public Health for more details.
The company I work for, Make llc, is now using AI to generate backgrounds and imagery for our animated work. Our industry is normalizing the use of ai generated imagery which will vastly phase out the use of human artists to render artwork.
If you are aspiring to be a commercial artist I would strongly discourage going to school/college for any of it. Schooling will set you on average 100k+ in debt in an industry that nearly most animators will never see above 50-60k in yearly wages on the high end. Animation is a high debt, low income industry and it is only becoming more so.
My advice is to stay out of debt and ensure you have career/life-trajectory flexibility.
I've gotten a few emails from young artists asking me how I developed my art style, what they can do to improve their own art styles, and their frustrations with their own work. I really do sympathize with young artists who get wrapped up in art style woes, since the same thing happened to me (and probably everyone who's ever picked up a pencil!). I used to get really frustrated when my art wasn't perfect. I'd compare my work to others, thinking I should be at a certain level at a certain age ("because that one 18-year-old's work is so amazing, why can't that be me?!"), and most of all, always trying to find that "perfect art style."
So now that I'm a 30-something-year-old professional comic artist that hasn't thought about art style in a while, I thought I'd share my own "art style journey," what I was thinking at every stage, and hopefully stress that a perfect art style should never be the goal of art, as it's impossible to achieve perfection! It also isn't a race. Art style is just a reflection of how you currently draw-- as you draw more and improve and become influenced by new things, that style inevitably changes over time. How you draw at 15 will be vastly different than how you draw at 25, or 35, or 80.
For me, when I was a kid, I mostly drew Pokemon, Sonic, and random anime. Here's some stuff I drew on our now long dead dial-up computer, when I was around 14-16.
This was back in the golden age of DeviantArt, where early 2000s anime styles were king. But by 17-18, I felt my art was starting to look too similar. I wanted to bring in more western influence, and try to find a more "unique" art style, whatever that meant (this is also when I first started conceptualizing ideas that would become Oddity Woods!).
There was still an anime influence, but it also had that 2012 Tumblr style seep in. Also Marietta and Wyatt were adults! And were completely different characters! When OW became more of a mystery/puzzle game-inspired work, I wanted the art to reflect those things. I ended up studying the background characters in Professor Layton games, because I really liked the weird shapes they had. I tried incorporating more shapes into my work.
I was really trying to push motion more, while also taking influence from early 2000's western cartoons, which were more angular and had very distinct silhouettes for every character.
Eventually the chibi-er art style came around, influenced by the rounder-looking western cartoons that were popular at the time like SU.
This was the point where I felt I had the final designs nailed down, but I remember still being so nit-picky and frustrated about my work. I remember thinking "Okay, I want to make Oddity Woods a comic, but I don't want to start until I'm at THIS level," or "Once I'm THIS good, I'll do it!" The thing is... there was no way I was going to start that comic with that mindset. If it wasn't for my college art class pushing me to finally do it, OW probably wouldn't have been made.
I started making pages of the webcomic in 2015 (I was around 21). The art style wasn't perfect (at least not like the perfect image in my head), and there were a lot of mistakes. But throughout the three years I posted pages, the style continued to change in subtle ways.
Making comics has the really cool effect of forcing you to keep drawing no matter what, flaws and all, and doesn't care about where your art style is at, because it WILL change, like... twenty pages later! As I got progressively burnt out on Oddity Woods due to other circumstances around this time, I swapped tracks to work on Star Knights, which was based on a one-shot comic I made in 2017. Here's some of those old pages...
... versus the later pages of the 2022 graphic novel, 200+ pages in.
Even Misfit Mansion changed slightly from the original sample pages (pages used to pitch to publishers and are not final versions), versus the pages in the actual book.
Some people may look at all these examples and not really see a huge difference (and maybe that's something to recognize-- we see our mistakes much more easily than others!). But as the artist, the one who was once so bogged down by "achieving the best art style before I start making work!!!", the differences to me are HUGE. My work would not have evolved at all if I was still just focused on art style. Having done hundreds of comic pages, I'm now only focused on drawing fast, and I don't care as much about mistakes.
I still think the art style differences between old OW pages and the updated book pages are pretty noticeable! I wish I could have redrawn all of OW book 1, but again, that would be wasting time I can use to make more comics!!! And I'll probably go back in another ten years and think "I could draw that better now."
Anyway, all of this is to say, just keep drawing and have fun. I personally stopped caring about art style after getting into comics. The more I draw the characters, the easier it all becomes. It's a practice that becomes second nature as you continue doing it.
(on another note, I found a ton of old OW sketches in my college sketchbooks that I plan to post and talk about soon! >: ) )
WIPs of my shot for Grom Re-Danced, a reanimated project! I'm almost done, just need to finish the shadows, smooth out the lighting, and tweak the background colors. There are still a TON of shots available, please check out the discord, even just to poke around!
hey. I have a confession to make. I tried out AI-image-generators in 2021 out of curiousity. I thought, "hey, what if it really does do what it says it should do? What if it can imagine something I can't?" it did not. It was a horrifying mix of things I "typed "searched" and things that I could not think of. I thought it could at least make a funny amalgam. But it wasn't even interesting in a "pattern on the wall" way.
Why am I writing this? Because trying it out back then, I realized it was really just a fancy hoax and I had no more interest in trying it more.
(also you cannot tell me to try it for game graphics or "temporary photographics" anymore either - I just cannot see it as being useful in this area, when there are actual artists and photographers looking for work.)
And I hope writing about this will leave me with ideas on what to write on the "annoying network", to be more loud about this topic. I have been seeing multiple friends, family and aqcuaintances post their ai-generated portraits with pride, as if they made it, or as if it makes them look better. it does not. it just makes them look like they don't care anymore, are going along with a trend and forgot that they have artist friends/family who actually do need the work.
I am writing in hopes that I'll get more ideas on what to write, how to write more about this topic on this other site. So these friends, family and other people will also learn to quit.
Also, the ideas I was trying to think of, I could have made 20 drawings of, had I gone the actual art route. I already had decades of experience in drawing, painting and other visual arts at that point, but the ideas are what I struggle with. I realized later I just feel "head empty" because I don't work on those ideas + I had low confidence in those ideas at the time.
Knowing that other image generators just "scraped" milions of images and other data from other artists turned me off trying this completely.
I even tried out a "music mixing generator" by an independent coder in 2022, because I had no faith in my own skills or abilities and I thought that if it wasn't using the same tech as others, it would be something more ethical to base music on. it was not.
true, this was when this version of ai was still at the "start" of its boom, but point being - stop using this stuff for what we can already do on our own, like graphics and music. it's bad for nature and it's completely useless. you are being grifted by companies hoping to profit from this boom.
I recommend even - stop using it to rewrite your emails or other dumb tasks your boss asks you to do. (The underlying problem here is that we have to do pointless jobs at all.)
I know my artist friends are tired of hearing it, but I implore you as a reader to think about why your schools, work, stores and other places are so quick to jump on the bandwagon.
So, some random artist online used AI for one time, what now?
I hope this is a good lesson that even if you tried this tech, you can quit and not support it anymore. Any time. it's always OK to quit.
People in general have become more impatient for their instant gratification and AI-gen and chatbots are just another way for them to lose even more of their attention on something "popular and pretty". Or they believe that it genuinely makes their life easier because they've been promised that it's efficient and saves their time at work. And it sickens me that even if I explain this with patience, these friends and family still continue use it. Because they're getting used to it. Because everyone is doing it. It's a trend now. Every app offers its own solution to this. And people eat it up if they are bored or curious. "Instant gratification" meaning, they get their "pretty image" faster than an artist can make. Less fuss too, at least in theory.
But there's always something awful about it. I can tell that the images are fake. Even if they bring joy to the "commissioner", to have their own "original image" without spending a dime- those images will never live up to the genuine photo or painting. The sad part is that people don't care much if they feel like that's a better option.
Even if you turn away from the superficial reasons (it's ugly, it's fake, it's wrong), there's also actual damage done from using this tech.
And I wish both these friends and other people could stop relying on it for simple or complex stuff - you will eventually lose your skill in this basic thing. Again, a topic that has been written about, but it's just on my mind and I have to put it up in writing.
Even when there's proof (AI-datacenters in areas of water scarcity increase, EthicalGeo, 2025; How Data Centers Are Transforming Water Use, Environmental Law Institute, 2025; The Land and Water Impacts of the AI Boom, The Lincoln Institute, 2025; literally search for any "ai-datacentre impacts" and you will have droves of articles breaking it down for you), this bubble has been blown so large, anyone outside the bubble believes to be something genuinely useful.
There's even proof about how it poisons your brain, or how self-help chatbots have actually lead to the harming of people. (Your Brain on ChatGPT, MIT study; Psychology Today article on mental health risks of ChatGPT)
They're not even genuine AI. Just predictive language models that have been marketed as artificial intelligence. (Another topic that's been written about by tech people more active than me).
It's a marketing hype and you fell for it. We all kinda did for a bit there. But you can always quit.
Maybe the "only silver lining", even a wisp of a sliver, is how this will turn the more annoying art client away. But that is still not a good thing. I'd rather have annoying clients who I have to teach in how to commission, than annoying clients who turn to the long-time scam that this AI-stuff has been turned into.
Happy New Year! Here's something new and different. Anybody remember the "He's doing!" Goblin? From that one time I played Gartic Phone with RubberRoss and Drawfee? Well, this is them now. Hell of a journey.
Firealpaca update archive: animation features (onion skin mode) from 2015 - 10 years of Firealpaca animation features
I was recently reminded of how old Firealpaca animation mode actually is, so I thought I would write about it!
This blog hasn't always archived all the updates from Firealpaca so I thought I would go looking if there were any posts about one of the biggest feature updates Firealpaca has had: animation mode
Animation mode released on 28th of October 2015. So it's already over 10 years old! Here's some fun animations done with it by the Ever-Blue webcomic author Ten. If you want to remember what it looked like, a tutorial was also posted by Obtusity on DeviantArt in 2015.
Animation mode was called "Onion Skin Display Mode" and came with 3 important features once you switched to it from the View menu: "Show Next/Prev Frame" as well as "Select Next (Upper) Frame" + "Select Previous (Lower) Frame" and "Autoplay". You could also export your frames when in Onionskin Mode. This feature works the same way as it did then: the PNG frames are numbered from 000 and you can select a folder to export them into.
The Onionskin Mode did not feature a "Export GIF" function however, so the makers of Firealpaca released a website just for that: AlpacaDouga. Obtusity posted a tutorial about this on October 12th, 2016.
In 2018, the "Always display the first frame" feature was added with version 1.9.1. This meant that if someone had a background or a non-animated graphic they wanted under the animated part, it would always be displayed as the bottom layer! An earlier update also added the “Import frames as Layers” feature.
With the update 2.3.11 released 2020-09-07, Onion Skin Mode was renamed into Animation Mode
Frrom 2020-10-12, it was possible now to export GIFs from Firealpaca directly with version 2.3.17 and onwards.
Starting from 2021-07-12 and version 2.5.7, all animation mode features were moved under their own menu. File exports were still handled from the File menu, but you could now export more than still frame PNG sequences. It also became possible to specify the display time of frames in auto-playback - change the fps. This meant the autoplay function now let you set the fps. A/N: Although I personally remember that changing the fps settings was always a feature, I might remember wrong - so if anyone has screenshots of that, reply in the comments!
In 2021, this update also meant that the AlpacaDouga service was discontinued:
But the Animation Mode itself got more quality updates, such as extra onion skin settings (changing the color of the onion skin frames) as well as onion skin numbering.
This is what the animation menu has looked like now from 2021 to now in version 2.14.1 (january 2026 update)
Now it is possible to export as frames, as GIF, APNG and even MP4.
For the sake of archiving this log, especially since it's not documented on this blog, here's the old update log from 2015, google translated from the japanese update log:
FireAlpaca version 1.5.0 released (2015-10-21)
Add pattern brush and bitmap watercolor brush
Allows free deformation of folders (applies to 1,8,32bpp layers)
Supports parsing correction during free deformation
Added Onion Skin Display Mode
Added layer sequential PNG output function (in onion skin mode)
Layer auto-play function (in Onion Skin mode)
Change UI color to blue base
Move the filter to an independent menu
Enables movement lock of color palette
Fixed some bugs
And that's it! I can't believe Animation mode in Firealpaca is already more than 10 years old! Thank you for reading this far and I hope this helps more people become interested in using this under-appreciated feature of Firealpaca!
Shout-out to a friend from discord for asking about the animation mode (they didn't know I run this blog), so I thought it would be nice to make a little overview of some of the history of animation mode :)
It's the 20th anniversary and we're taking a stand alongside our Black cartoonist members and friends to demand a change to honor Black History Month- draw your comics on the 8th, not the 1st!
http://hourlycomicsday.com/
The Hiveworks Artist Guild has released a public statement alleging years of labor abuses, financial mismanagement, and misconduct at Hiveworks at the hands of Xellette “Xel” Velamist and Isabelle “Isa” Melançon. Read their full statement HERE
Attached image is their logo, no credit (artists asked to not be credited).
Reblogging the article from the co-op, where our letter is hosted, to let folks know that the 'isa' mentioned above is the same person who does the 'crow time' comics under the name Secondlina.
Please take the time to read the article, and please be cautious if she ever approaches you, she is not to be trusted.
thank you to everyone who has supported us, this was a really intense day for us at the hive guild!
Here's a bluesky thread I curated of artists that have come forward with specific stories and incidents to read in detail.
Reminder to stick to facts and leave personal speculation and petty grievances to a minimum. It's important to center the creatives that were affected.
Some ink tests, re-making my zebracookie brush from Firealpaca in Krita. Quite fun! Making technical tests like these can sometimes trick me into being more creative than other times.
Pledge for Okenki on Art Fight! This one was really fun to think through! I had fun making all the tiny effects and thinking about how to make the drawing feel the character - a hunter on their best day! the drawing went super fast for that!
I thought it would be nice if I could start putting up some of my Art Fight pieces again, even the older ones. Thanks for telling me you took part this @okenki and I'm glad I got to draw at least one of your characters!
Please check out Okenki's tumblr page and itch when you get the chance!
origamiaround
germansingergirl
janainaart
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romaincrisis
