alternative ending. serious headcanons on this blog only of course
my joke philosophy is that if a character has their ears covered at all times then they exist in a state of superposition wherein it is possible for them to simultaneously have ears and to not have ears. and we can't know for sure unless we check. which is why i think krishna has no ears. or does he? we will never know
Hello! I’m the anon who asked if I could use your art for an ita bag a while ago and here it is. It’s not entirely finished, but I still wanted to share it. I didn’t end up using as much fanart as I thought I would, but the piece of yours I included is my favorite Ulrich fanart ever and I couldn’t leave it out
helpppp the fact you chose that one specifically... i still think that pic is very funny & i'm glad you enjoy it so much lol your bag looks awesome !!!
Do you have any tips with getting better with anatomy and coloring? Your art is SO gorgeous i love seeing it on my fyp
hi anon, thank you very much! sorry for taking so long to reply, i wasn't sure what to say. i don't consider myself especially proficient when it comes to either anatomy or coloring haha, i would say i have a basic understanding of them both but no special tricks up my sleeve that i could share with you. colors are especially tricky for me unless we're talking specifically about color matching, which i think i'm pretty good at, but rendering and painting are not my forte, i don't really have the patience for it. i love looking at and studying it in other people's art, but unless i'm pressuring myself to color, i always gravitate back to monochrome inking. i just love the simplicity of clean lines, you know? i really enjoy doing lineart.
with that being said, what i usually see recommended by other artists (and what i personally found quite educational) is the morpho series by michel lauricella. there's a bunch of them on the internet archive:
anatomy for artists
fat and skin folds
muscled bodies
joint forms and muscular functions
skeleton and bone reference points
clothing folds
face, head, and neck
hands and feet
simplified forms
mammals
anatomy for sculptors (better quality) (this one is not of the morpho series, and is by different authors, but the graphs in it are pretty extensive)
i haven't read all of them & even those i have looked at i don't exactly read; i'm a visual learner so mostly i just look at the images. that also extends beyond anatomy books; i talked about this in a similar post before, but what works for me is always looking at things with the intent to learn. i use myself as a reference quite often (particularly for hands), and i people-watch anytime i can, which is all of the time.
i can't really recommend anything on the color front besides similarly just looking at things, looking for art you vibe with, learning from and imitating others... i've saved some art-related posts over the years, some of which go into color matching, maybe you'll find some of them useful (please don't follow that blog though)...
at the end of the day being an artist is just having a meat grinder in your brain that processes everything you see, moreso everything you enjoy, into one big pile of goo that makes up your artistic self... and you have to nurture the goo by continously feeding it concepts and visuals... that is the only wisdom i can share with you. i can't help but get a little philosophical when talking about art because i struggle to see it from a purely technical standpoint, which is why i'm really bad at making tutorials or explaining my drawing process. but hopefuly you'll find my words at least somewhat helpful!
i'm reading neo devilman right now and the story in volume 1 that shows akira "remembering" that ryo is actually totally his childhood best friend made me curious, in all the subsequent spin offs and adaptations, have they ever explored the idea of akira being friends with the real ryo asuka before he died? because while satan (or jenny, i suppose?) inserting fabricated memories of a close relationship into akira's mind is certainly a fun & interesting angle i feel like akira knowing the real ryo and then being made to forget that he died & believe that his face actually totally always looked like this would be its own kind of fucked lol
@solarzilla that's really fun i didn't know this ! i've yet to get acquainted with older tensei games & not planning to play smtv until i do so i haven't seen him before. but that's awesome
two wires got crossed in my brain (sprites and my thought process under the cut)
satan was easiest to draw because thankfully there is no shortage of naked angels in smt compendium that i could draw inspiration from; mainly i used virtue, angel, and narcissus's sprites as a visual guide.
the pose is in reference to a scene from crybaby and also this panel from amon (which i haven't read properly yet, just flipped through volume 1 to ogle at the art lol):
for the race i was choosing between divine, tyrant, and fallen (all among previously attributed to smt's various versions of satan) but ultimately settled on fallen because it feels more accurate to this version of satan, at least in name.
the stats + resistances are taken from smt iv apocalypse's satan, with the exception of the level (in smtiva satan is lvl 99) just because the screenshot i used as a base to edit had a long "next xp" window and i didn't feel like editing it further to say 0 xp so i just made it 98 lol. the number is a silly reference to that "i love you" equation (128√e980) that was going around on the internet a million lifetimes ago except obviously without the root sign & e. so i guess it just says iloyou. but it's the thought that counts.
the skills (both satan & devilman's) are taken from devilman grimoire which hand on my heart i thought was really stupid but it was very funny to me that the artist assigned names to the attacks that they yell out during fights:
i love that they made satan straight up screech like a harpy... i wasn't sure whether to make the cosmic (...) skill a support or a recovery skill because in the manga satan uses it during a fight with miki & akira to undo being chopped in half (taste of their own medicine...) so i reasoned that as a videogame skill it could undo a previous round of enemy actions, but since smtiv doesn't have skills that are this specific it would be something like hp recovery + removal of ally debuffs and enemy buffs, if there were any, and buff/debuff stuff seems more fit for support category. then again it could also be hp recovery + ailments removal making it akin to smtiv's salvation (not the lameass nerfed smtiva variant... no offense krishna) therefore a recovery skill, but in the end i thought agaisnt making it a recovery skill simply because recovery skills have a heart icon and there is no such thing as love, as per crybaby satan (oh well).
the almighty skill wasn't in grimoire, my wife just argued that it would make sense for satan to have an almighty skill & i thought it might as well be the beam of light that crybaby's satan shoots at devilman (to shorten him up a little, you know). to elaborate: i really loved how in smtiv chaos and neutral routes when you fight merkabah (who i've compared to devilman satan on this blog a couple of times before), it has an almighty skill called "shalt not resist", a name i found to be very poetic. satan's almighty skill & its name are similarly thematically appropriate, with a little bit of ironic "symbolism" woven into it, which is that with almighty skills being un-dodgeable by default, you could make a reach and say it's sort of metaphorical of how satan's multiple lifetimes on earth are cyclical & (almost) always leading to the same outcome (making it un-dodgeable, in a way, but always a result of their actions). and it's the very last thing they say to akira in the original manga:
now onto devilman... i'm ashamed to say i put way less thought into him LOL
for visual inspiration i couldn't think of any specific demon designs to lean into, he's sort of an amalgamation of a lot of different sprites (namely baphomet & camazotz), and the thought process for the pose was just "it should be something devilman-y"...
i was stumped for a bit as to what to choose for the race, my options were fury, tyrant, and fiend, because fury seemed fitting, and a post on reddit (i know) said that apparently in the original japanese version of smtiv the name for the races tyrant & fiend mean "demon lord" (which is why i also considered it for satan) and "demon + man" respectively. i thought of demon lord because amon is very powerful and a lot of demons seem to be afraid of him, but thinking more on it amon =/= devilman so it wouldn't make sense to use that race specifically. fiend also felt off (and a lot of people in the comments under that reddit post were fighting with op about translation correctness) so in the end i settled on fury because i recently played through the first raidou kuzunoha game and in it the fury race was reserved for more physical-combat-oriented demons, essentially fighters, and i thought that would fit devilman just fine.
the stats + resistances i wrote in mostly at random; the level obviously just a haha funny number, the next xp number is the date the original devilman manga started running (as per wikipedia). like i said above, the skills are from devilman grimoire, but i also wanted to give him an electric skill because he does electricity-based attacks with his eyebrows/antennae (at least that's what i interpreted them to be), but i couldn't come up with anything for the name so i just put it in the learnable skills section since you don't know their names until after the demon learns them lol.
also, as a general fun fact, since i wanted to have all the text be written in smtiv's font, but didn't feel like assembling each word letter by letter from screenshots, i went through a very convoluted journey to make it an actual typeface font. here it is (google drive link), in case you'd like to use it too. it's kind of really bad because the site i used to process it rounded all the edges, and for some reason the default kerning is absolutely atrocious (and i don't know how to fix it), but thankfully the program i draw in lets me adjust kerning & leading of text so i was able to make it look more or less presentable (5% horizontal spacing in ibisx, for reference).
to see the uncensored inks, clean lineart, my mockup screenshots, and uncropped sprites (and satan's TITS!!!), click here (google drive link)
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