Carpathain Skies ✨

Hi i'm Bee! (they) come watch in abject horror, or fascination if you're so inclined, as I try to make visual novel out of my art degree

[carpathian-skies]

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Itch.io (this is where you can download the demo!)

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The Wiki (possible spoilers in this work in progress)

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(oﾟvﾟ)ノ Carpathian Skies' final demo is out! ~30 min for one playthrough, ~90 min to see all branches. Includes the Prologue + Act One’s opening, plus your first real look at a member of the Carpathia’s crew.

Please note that the characters depicted above and the ones in the demo are not the crew's finalized designs, those should be up soon!

[carpathian-skies]

I wish there was a way to share Carpathia's music where it were visually interesting

[carpathian-skies]

hi Bee! do you plan on releasing Carpathian Skies on steam? i would love to buy the game once it's out!

I would love to! Unfortunately, there's a $100 fee/deposit when someone registers games on Steam and I won't have that much to spare anytime soon. Once act 1's done, I'll probably have it up on Itch for the price of my cat's food, if it does better than I think it will, I'll see if I can port it to Steam xx

[carpathian-skies]

I've somehow ended up in a Monkey Paw situation where this is the most amount of interaction I've ever gotten for anything related to Carpathian Skies by a huge gap... it's just me showing my clip studio workspace in an Instagram comment section from my personal acc

(ノへ￣、) here's a closer look if anyone here is interested. The purple guide line that's on the character's thighs is the cut off for where the sprites'll be behind the game's text box. The only things that aren't shown that I use are the hot keys for my Wacom (my scroll wheel is set to zoom in and out and I have key for new layers while the pen itself goes between two different brushes that I use most) The furthest right carrot past the brushes is a drop down to all the assets I've downloaded and the respective folders I've stuck them. behind the navigator on the left hand side, I have auto action and layer properties and behind my layers I have my step history

[carpathian-skies]

My favorite thing about Wynn being the shortest is that there's so much dead space around their sprite that I can use to make their hair bigger

[carpathian-skies]

🐝🐝 If I remember correctly, the storyline said that the MCs' eyes weren't their real eyes. So I'm curious to know what those eyes look like. (Their new eyes?)

Ah okay so! The MC which I refer to as "The Project" because they are in essence a Frankenstein creation and it makes them sound more mysterious (the reason for their making is a whole different matter that I won't get sidetracked with here) but your eyes are taken from a high ranking political figure of the archipelago that makes up the game setting named High Councilor Thea Argos. The reason the crew of the Carpathia picks the player up is because they have taken up a public bounty to retrieve the eyes of the Councilor. Unfortunately, they are inside your head by this point

The Project's/Thea's eyes are a goldy amber, close to this...

(this is part of the main menu screen which is still getting a final gussy up)

[carpathian-skies]

Des when she has a cup of tea and gets to watch a sunrise vs when she stayed up all night doing paperwork and the tea got cold

[the-quasar-hero]

If y’all don’t check out @carpathian-skies ‘ visual novel and their awesome art then [insert absurd consequence that can’t happen]

[carpathian-skies]

Hiii I just got here but the premise for your game seems really cool and I love how the designs for crew members/love interests are turning out! I noticed that earlier versions of Desdemona have red hair and then it changed to grey, was that just for aesthetic reasons or does she have something like Marie Antoinette syndrome? Also I can't wait to learn more about each of them in the player character 💞

Ah thank you! Desdemona has a condition called Cobalt Saturation Syndrome (also called The Grey). any prolonged exposure to cobalt will make people sick but if someone was exposed to excessive amounts of cobalt while their parent was pregnant with them (via the air and water their parent was subject to), they grow up having gray hair as the most visible sign of the disease. In Carpathia's setting cobalt has been used to power anything that we consider electronic or needs fuel so it's everywhere. (though Council members are pushing towards a focus on solar energy but that's a whole different basket of apples)

Esper and Cirrus also have sections of their hair that are grey but not to the degree that our dear captain does since Des was born the poorest part of the largest industrial city in the game's setting called the Core Spire which is prone to having cobalt vents appear and widen sometimes to have catastrophic degrees

Originally, she had dyed her hair red to match that of her to match that of her half-sister. It was going to be a big reveal for the story, but it didn't really fit with how her character is developing

[carpathian-skies]

I want to eat the ink bottle in your banner. It looks so nice to bite on, how did you render it omg I love it RAH

Cell shading babeeeee! I found that its easier/faster for me to take my experience painting backdrops and stick it into digital art than it is trying to have a more painterly style within the bounds of Clip Studio. Most backdrops for theatre (and film) are usually blocks of color that aren't blended together because it's faster to do it that way and prevents things from getting muddy depending on where the audience is. The best way I found to figure out what sections are what color is to focus on the effect and not the object itself [this is a good video on how to do that]

Here's a little closer up version of it with the layers I didn't merge! 'pot' is the inkwell. It's relatively small on the canvas and isn't the focal point of the finished piece so I wasn't super precise with it. (in comparison to something like Desdemona's hair which I was very careful not having any squiggling lines for since her face is what people will be looking at when she's on screen) The first thing I did is sketch it out to make sure it's as proportional/perspectivey as I can get it and then I ink it like this

Then I flat color it, usually I do one color for the whole element but since this is glass and close to the light source, I broke down in three base sections, then while keeping the hue the same I'll go and change the croma or value to add more detail. Since the light source is coming from the left most of the brighter colors will be towards that

I do the same thing with the bounce light. One way to get good contrast is to pick a triad color of the base for it, for the inkwell the base is a slate/green so the triad colors are purple and yellow. I picked yellow because that's closer to the light of the candle flame. The ink spill itself is a lot smaller and since I wasn't expecting anyone to focus on this part I just blocked out the purple and then blurred them together with the smudge tool then went back and added some detail

To keep every element of the drawing looking like they come from the same picture I add an overlay gradient to each of them (for this little guy the gradients all go from a yellow to blue) and adjust it according to where the light in the shadows are

Once every bit of the drawing is done I copy all the layers and then merge them so can I tweak the overall levels as one cohesive piece (^人^)

[carpathian-skies]

I wanted to map out the ship to make sure I didn't have any weird floating rooms that didn't make sense and I thought that using Paralives would be more fun than remembering how to use Blender or AutoCAD ( •̀ ω •́ )✧

[carpathian-skies]

I wasn't going to mention this until I got them all sorted buuut the six crew members of the Carpathia'll have subtle sprite variants! Esper here has a version of her with her hair braided and one not braided (her hair down will be seen during night scenes and a few other circumstances I shan't spoil) (◡‿◡) I hope you like her final design (minus some details/color adjustments) as much as I do

[carpathian-skies]

Oh my god... she's bald

[carpathian-skies]

I'm stunned by your art. It looks so nice.

I put a lot of time into trying to get better so that's gratifying to hear! Thank you so much (╯▽╰ )

[carpathian-skies]

A break from Zephyr to bring you the angriest woman you've never met

[carpathian-skies]

which color scheme do you like the best

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Voting ended onJun 26

One of the things that I've been trying to be conscientious of is to not have the core crew members be dictated by a single color (ie. This is the red character, they're hot headed but also the leader! This is the blue character and they're the calm and collected one! Orange? They're the tech savvy one who's funny!) because I think that trope is incredibly boring. that also adds a harmony challenge to the characters since they all need to look like they belong together but not to the point that they're uniform or they clash (^人^)

Also the post before this one on my blog is a is a monochromatic closer up version of his sprite if there's any details you want to get a better look at xx

[carpathian-skies]

I can't decide on a color scheme (；′⌒`)