What if-
(please let’s pretend I posted this before we knew about Squaridot’s existence, I had already doodled this by then and felt bad about throwing the whole comic away. It’s not like this was meant to be taken seriously anyway.
I hope we’ll get to see more peridots in the show as well!)
Sure, feel free to do it!
I'll take this as a chance to inform anyone else that might be wondering anything along those lines that I'm usually fine with people using my drawings as profile pictures or reposting them, BUT ONLY as long as I'm getting credited and they're not being monetized in any way or sold-
(I'm looking at you asshole from China that a few years ago stole one of my anime fanarts and sold it on printed canvas on Ebay at 15$ each, I hope from the bottom of my heart that anything you might have earned from those posters was spent in medications for chronic diarrhea)
-nor their signature is cropped out!
Seriously though, thanks to all of you! Each of those messages made me smile so much it's almost embarassing ahah-
I just hope that those of you who might have decided to follow me won't be too disappointed eventually if the quality of the drawings will decrease, sadly making detailed comics can take me from weeks to months (that's in part thanks to me getting distracted a lot though), so if I want to share some material before new episodes will risk to make it conflict too much with what's canon, at some point I'll just have to rush it.
Still, I'll try my best at attempting to make more!
(there are still some asks and messages I have to reply to... I'm slow with this kind of stuff but I'll get to them as soon as possible too)
I'm not sure if the first three asks were sent by the same person because I got them all in a row as soon as I posted that thing... but the implied tone in some parts seems to be different I guess...? Welp, same anon or not, it's the same topic so I'm just gonna reply to everything plus that fourth ask here anyway.
The following text might be a little long, I put it under the cut so that those who want to avoid boring expositions can just scroll past this.
First of all... I merely made a dumb comic about a silly thing happening with the canon drawings, it's not like I threatened to hunt down the people in the Crewniverse to throw bees at them or something; I'd hardly define what I did as "overreacting" tbh.
Second, if you think about the general quantity of episodes the occasional mediocre drawings might not seem many, but I'm taking in consideration only Peridot's screen time.
Up until "Too Short To Ride" she had good looking proportions most of the time with some occasional derpy scenes, and that was fine as long as they were outweighted by the well drawn parts.
I feel that the mistakes with her character's proportions increased ever since "Kindergarten Kid", so that's why I only mentioned that lately her proportions were fluctuating a lot... and it's not like we got many more episodes featuring Peridot since then anyway, there were just "Gem Harvest" (and on that one the "meh" frames were almost only at the beginning from what I remember), "Adventures in Light Distortion", "The New Crystal Gems" and "Room for Ruby"... in each of them there were some good drawings of her as well, but most looked off. That's where my point stands, in those episodes due to a majority of defective frames she DOES objectively look smaller compared to the previous material.
It got to the point where a good chunk of the scenes featuring her looks weird due to either her body being squashed orizontally, the head/body and waist/shoulders proportions changing ratios, and her head being too large on a small body; I think the latter one might be an attempt to keep her face visible when she's in the background, but when she's next to a character taller than her, the animators don't adjust the body accordingly so that she won't end up looking too tall in comparison.
If you look at earlier episodes such as "Too Short To Ride" (or her redemption arc) she was depicted with a more slender shape and it aesthetically worked anyway... I'd be glad if the Crewniverse went back to that style, but considering Peridot wasn't exactly the focus in the latter episodes I guess it could simply be attribuited to a minorance of scenes with her and we might just see better proportions when she'll be given more screen time anyway.
It might not be the hugest deal ever and it's not like I'm gonna start throwing shit at anyone for it, but that doesn't mean I can't at least feel disappointed whenever I see my favourite character being drawn with weird proportions more and more often, while I KNOW and HAVE SEEN that the artists working on the show can actually create really good stuff.
That comic wasn't about me throwing a fit to attack the show's creators, I was merely trying to make a joke about a minor but existent flaw that bothers me.
(and I admit I kinda would have liked to see a similiar scenario to be honest, of course not with Peridot shrinking into oblivion, but imho a malfunction with her physical form could have justified the weird drawings - that'd be the case if it were only a problem related to her, but I'm aware it happens to the rest of the cast as well sometimes so I guess that's out of question - and be a decent plot-device to bring up again the matter of her limb enhancers to get more insight about some topics that surround them. Of course I can't say it would be objectively the best solution for the show considering I don't know how the creators are planning to go on with the story and what other topics they want to tackle along the way, but that's just part of the stuff I'd personally like to see addressed again.)
Regarding the second ask, I understand perfectly that seeing the same critiques over and over can get annoying pretty soon - for example, I can't even install any Tumblr extension to block specific tags and be spared from drowning in posts about topics I'd rather avoid, so, while I personally wouldn't complain to anyone who makes them, I fully get your point of view on how being exposed often to something that annoys you can be frustrating -, but that does't mean that people who criticize the show necessarily hate it.
For example (besides that thing with the inconsistent proportions) I'm really not too enthusiast about how some things were developed or addressed in the show so far, but I still love it and I'm strongly hoping that the Crewniverse might simply be planning to bring them up again in the future.
I won't go in detail about them right now because at the moment I don't feel like risking to get a bunch of people metaphorically jumping at my throat due to different opinions on a cartoon, but - at least in my own experience with SU - if I ended up caring enough about those situations or events to be honestly disappointed when they didn't met my expectations, it is because I liked the show they took place into enough to get invested in it and believed in its potential.
Also regardless of that, I see nothing wrong in criticism itself as long as it's not just rude complaints or baseless opinions pushed onto other people and stated as objective facts; whether you love or hate a work of fiction it's not a bad thing to notice problems with it and discuss them, it might bring up awareness about them and authors/artists/whoever else might need them could learn from the mistakes pointed out and develope more consciously their own works. This isn't directly related to the show, but for example part of the reason I started improving at drawing - going from weird anime blobs to sometimes-not-too-weird anime and cartoon blobs - is because I kept paying attention to critiques moved to other artists and learned what could be improved through their discussions.
(And heck, sometimes it's just nice to address something that bothers you to get it off your chest and receive some form of company/validation from people who might agree with your point of view, as long as it's not done rudely to harrass people it shouldn't be a problem)
Anyway, I'm kinda wondering why you sent that ask to me specifically, when out of twelve posts on this blog there's only one for now that might be considered slightly critical, and it's only a light-hearted silly thing mostly for shit and giggles. I don't lurk much in the "SU critical" part of the fanbase so I'm not sure if among them there are people who outright hate the show, but either way I think your ask would have been more fitting on any other blog that actually DOES post regularly about criticism.
And about the third ask, I DO know there's not set character height, I'm aware that was a deliberate choice on the Crewniverse's part to have more versatility in shot compositions, atmosphere and such, in theory it was a great idea... but they proved it can be a double-edged blade as well. Just because you're given some limited freedom with the characters' heights it doesn't mean you should do whatever you want and go completely off model.
By the way I doubt that what happens occasionally in SU is due to the artists deciding to not stick with the references, I think it might be more about time restrictions to consign the material... I'm not sure of how the animation industry works though, so any word about it on my part would be just baseless blabbers and suppositions.
And finally, the fourth ask I got hours later so I'm sure it's not from the same person!
It is indeed due to the factors you mentioned, basically the artists are given a general idea of characters's height by knowing how tall they should approximately be in relation to each other, then any other minor variation - just like you said - comes from the personal trait of who's in charge of the storyboards. Oooor...I guess so. That's what I kept hearing at least in the almost two years I spent lurking in the fandom.
I'm happy you liked the comic by the way!
I hope this text wasn't too much of a mess, I'm not very good at writing down my thoughts and opinions, and even worse at doing so briefly... The fact that English isn't my first language doesn't exactly help either.
(OH and ironically enough, someone commented on a repost of my comic on another site pointing out that Lapis is HUGE in the third panel compared to the background.
And holy fucking shit SHE IS. HOW DID I NOT NOTICE THAT, SHE'S LIKE, FOUR TIMES THE HEIGHT OF THE COUNTER-
I'd probably be sulking in shame and regret if it wasn't so damn ironic given the context, ahah. Welp, at least next time I'll know I need to be more careful with similiar stuff.)
I kinda wanna cling to the hope that there might actually be a rational reason plot wise behind Peridot’s proportions fluctuating so much, but I’m probably just deluding myself... I’d be really happy if her head/torso/thighs were depicted with the same proportions they had before, sob.
Oh, and I know there are already dozens of posts about it, but I had wanted to make a comparison chart ever since last year and just as I was about to make it, everyone started sharing their own :’)
I still wanted to post something about the topic, so... uh. There you go. Have this 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨.
Can I just--I love your art. Oh my goodness. Ugh. I love you.
Jokes aside, thank you so much!Ever since I made this blog every once in a while I got kind messages like yours, it still feels kinda strange - although in a good way - to think that people I never talked to passed by here and decided to take some of their time to write something nice, especially because I don’t think the stuff I post is actually all that great... so it’s always reassuring knowing when people like it!
At least for a while it’s probably better for everyone if it just stays as a thought to be honest-I could try explaining how I do something specific, but both my drawing and colouring process are an absolute mess; most of the time I just start with a messy doodle, rush things trying to colour it nicely right away, and then end up with some chromatic disgrace that finally looks kinda alright only after hours of editing and countless adjustment layers slapped on it.
This way it’s just inefficient and time consuming, learning from me wouldn’t be a great idea right now...
I think you need an icon of sorts! Some people are thinking your account is a dead done! I love your art! You deserve more followers!
Thanks a lot for your nice words, I’m really happy you like my stuff!I’ll also take your advice regarding the icon and try to doodle something for it soon, I’ve just been too lazy to think about it and kept procrastinating ahah
They want to see how long it will take her to realize on her own that what she’s holding isn’t a plant.
Also the oak wasn’t part of the gardening shop.
