CRAPPY BLUE - pixel art & chiptunes

- pixel artist & digital composer (she/her) -

[crappyblue]

my ring racers character pack, BADNIKPAK, is out now!! with a total of 9 racers and 3 followers, it's the biggest character mod i've made for anything so far, and it took me almost nine months of on-and-off work to complete it.

thank you to my teammates @amyfarbright and finley sinclaire for, respectively, their programming & audio work on the pack and graphic design on the pack's logo!

[crappyblue]

my badnik-focused character pack for ring racers just got a mania-themed update!

with the addition of three new racers and three new followers, the pack is feeling a lot more filled out :>

[sonicthehedgehog]

Let's end this Spirit Week with a Fan Art Friday! Show us your latest art or your favorite piece you've worked on, and you may be highlighted on our page!

Need some inspiration? We'd love to see your take on The Chaotix Casefiles!

[crappyblue]

Hog tools

[crappyblue]

this week, i hacked myself into the existing SMW rom hack Reverie so i could conceitedly enjoy seeing myself run around in one of my favorite games ^_^

[sonicthehedgehog]

Let's end this Spirit Week with a Fan Art Friday! Show us your latest art or your favorite piece you've worked on, and you may be highlighted on our page!

Need some inspiration? We'd love to see your take on The Chaotix Casefiles!

[crappyblue]

Hog tools

[crappyblue]

this week i finished another ring racers project: a sprite overhaul mod for mighty that brings him closer in-line with most of the game's character sprites using his segasonic sprites as a basis! you can find the mod here on the srb2 message boards

[crappyblue]

crappy blue 2024-2025 art summary

i haven't made and posted any year-end art summaries since the top of 2023, so i decided to ride the impulse tonight! i ended up making one for the last couple years since i had a lot of work in 2024 i was still proud of ^_^

a good chunk of what's here is stuff i never posted outside of discord servers and, in the case of june 2024's piece, cohost. i did a lot of scrounging for small and private works i did just so i could fill this out as best i could!

of all of that, the latest work at the bottom probably needs some context: for the last half a year, a handful of friends and i have been on-and-off working on a pokemon crystal rom hack that replaces the catchable pokemon with badniks from across the entire sonic series. it's remained a private project so far, and outside of this post, it's probably going to stay that way for a while. there isn't anything to show other than a lot of pixel art of badniks, so don't expect to hear anything any time soon :>

ever since dr. robotnik's ring racers came out in mid-2024, most of my artistic output has been racers i've made for mods. that energy has continued all the way to now, so if i manage to get myself to make another year-end summary next year, expect to see even more ring racers stuff on it, hehe

[crappyblue]

nude mods have, historically, been the domain of people sexing up games boringly and misogynistically. they mostly follow the mold already set by sexualized designs and animations in the titles they're modifying, and they mostly emphasize visible naked detail shallowly, passing over emulating the games' art styles and communicating believable form within them, making characters stick out as both different from and more generic than the other existing visuals. frankly, most nude mods skip the pretense of depicting character aligning with the game's tone, rather fixating on depicting bodies gratuitously. it's the use of nudity as sex appeal for a narrow range of tastes and it rarely carries any other value.

i aim to act in opposition to these tendencies. i present to you all: The First Ever Good Metroid Nude Mod

this mod injects a bit of samus' cool and unapproachable character and buffer design from super metroid's ending and official art into the first metroid. this isn't the overtly objectified suitless samus of metroid 1 with her pencil-thin waist and goofy expression; this is a honed and capable samus who is taking her situation very seriously. which is important, because she has to kill mother brain and escape zebes in only her boots

she's naked. but she's not afraid

okay okay, fun and all aside: why did i make this? i've always had an interest in nudity and especially nudity as a form of self-expression, nudity as identity, nudity as a choice made with some personal intent. i've spent many, many years of my life seeking out reflections of that interest in the works of people who would probably not understand it at all, and i've spent just as long resenting that all those works ever gave me was discomfort with myself.

for me, to take a character in a preexisting work and make them naked is to project myself onto them. i don't want to remove from them their agency and divorce them from themselves, i want to entwine their character with either the circumstance of being naked or the choice to be naked. it's easy to just take princess peach's dress off; can you approach her character in a way that makes her believably want it off? idk maybe, i don't actually care about the answer to this specific hypothetical

hi i'm dropping all the academic pretense i think samus is the kind of girl who would go naked recreationally. 1) she's trans (obviously) and i know a wealth of trans women whose journey with their bodies culminated in "i'm so hot. everybody needs to see this" 2) she's a genetically-engineered superwoman who could absolutely withstand more on her bare skin than any US soldier could with layers of protective padding 3) look just let me have this ok

[crappyblue]

every so often, this post still gets a like or two or even the occasional reblog, and that makes me happy :) thank you everyone for the positive reception

it's an exhausting thing to be faced with how nude mods are almost exclusively the domain of shallow sex appeal, particularly for straight men. sexual art is not inferior to art made with other intents, but nude mods are a medium where the desire of the creators and audience typically melts down to "naked woman with waifish body/huge tits and thin waist/jiggle physics jiggle physics jiggle physics". like the variety is truly lacking even if you are consuming it for its intended reasons.

sometimes it just rules to be a badass naked space warrior woman with broad shoulders. and that's an energy worth putting out into the world, too. if that sentiment captures you at all, then you should join me in carving this niche! especially if you work with 3d models my god, your job is way easier than mine since you don't have to do any animating LOL

[crappyblue]

i haven't posted about my music in a bit, but i have multiple chiptune albums out (alongside some other stuff) on my bandcamp, and it is bandcamp friday where bandcamp waives its cut of artist revenue, so... if you'd like to give a silly woman some money to help her keep up with bills... ^_^

[crappyblue]

the undertale memories page gave me an excuse to have fun drawing a very-slightly-monsterified me in 1-bit pixels. meow

[crappyblue]

nude mods have, historically, been the domain of people sexing up games boringly and misogynistically. they mostly follow the mold already set by sexualized designs and animations in the titles they're modifying, and they mostly emphasize visible naked detail shallowly, passing over emulating the games' art styles and communicating believable form within them, making characters stick out as both different from and more generic than the other existing visuals. frankly, most nude mods skip the pretense of depicting character aligning with the game's tone, rather fixating on depicting bodies gratuitously. it's the use of nudity as sex appeal for a narrow range of tastes and it rarely carries any other value.

i aim to act in opposition to these tendencies. i present to you all: The First Ever Good Metroid Nude Mod

this mod injects a bit of samus' cool and unapproachable character and buffer design from super metroid's ending and official art into the first metroid. this isn't the overtly objectified suitless samus of metroid 1 with her pencil-thin waist and goofy expression; this is a honed and capable samus who is taking her situation very seriously. which is important, because she has to kill mother brain and escape zebes in only her boots

she's naked. but she's not afraid

okay okay, fun and all aside: why did i make this? i've always had an interest in nudity and especially nudity as a form of self-expression, nudity as identity, nudity as a choice made with some personal intent. i've spent many, many years of my life seeking out reflections of that interest in the works of people who would probably not understand it at all, and i've spent just as long resenting that all those works ever gave me was discomfort with myself.

for me, to take a character in a preexisting work and make them naked is to project myself onto them. i don't want to remove from them their agency and divorce them from themselves, i want to entwine their character with either the circumstance of being naked or the choice to be naked. it's easy to just take princess peach's dress off; can you approach her character in a way that makes her believably want it off? idk maybe, i don't actually care about the answer to this specific hypothetical

hi i'm dropping all the academic pretense i think samus is the kind of girl who would go naked recreationally. 1) she's trans (obviously) and i know a wealth of trans women whose journey with their bodies culminated in "i'm so hot. everybody needs to see this" 2) she's a genetically-engineered superwoman who could absolutely withstand more on her bare skin than any US soldier could with layers of protective padding 3) look just let me have this ok

[crappyblue]

picked back up something i used to do where i kept a chronology of all the pixel art i'd done of my ref/sona over the years. the last time i touched this was back in 2016, so i had a good bit to add, though also not that much since i haven't drawn my representative character that often the last few years.

i added a bunch of arrows and excited marks to the last sprite in 2020 because it's the point where i started drawing a sona for myself based on how i actually present irl instead of a more masculine character who'd stopped really representing me a few years prior. it was a really pivotal shift for my self-perception and it basically effectively led to me embracing my actual gender and starting hrt a little over a year later, so it's very important to me!

[crappyblue]

in 2023 i achieved my final form. bear witness

[crappyblue]

BONUSCHARS, the collaborative ring racers mod pack i'm a part of, has seen a massive update--almost tripling the amount of racers!! i just spent the last three days making this trailer, so check it out and download the update!!

also, here's the two racers i made for this update!

[crappyblue]

for my void stranger let's play, i made this graphic template for the nonagram puzzles found in the game. through some specific use of layers and the continuous fill tool, i made it feel like an actual interactive picross game i could record for the lp, and i added some animation frames before and after to sell the illusion.

some of the assets here are pulled from void stranger itself, but the rest--specifically gray's portrait, the branching border beneath it, the patterning behind the puzzle's numbers, and the figures at the bottom--were all my work.

below the readmore is an exported gif of this template; it shows the solution for this nonagram.

[crappyblue]

picked back up something i used to do where i kept a chronology of all the pixel art i'd done of my ref/sona over the years. the last time i touched this was back in 2016, so i had a good bit to add, though also not that much since i haven't drawn my representative character that often the last few years.

i added a bunch of arrows and excited marks to the last sprite in 2020 because it's the point where i started drawing a sona for myself based on how i actually present irl instead of a more masculine character who'd stopped really representing me a few years prior. it was a really pivotal shift for my self-perception and it basically effectively led to me embracing my actual gender and starting hrt a little over a year later, so it's very important to me!

[crappyblue]

in 2023 i achieved my final form. bear witness

[crappyblue]

here's a piece i did last year. i prompted some friends for some fun accessories to draw myself in and i ended up with these! i drew these to nes graphical limitations just for fun--if you wanna know specifics, read below

the gist is that graphic tiles on the nes can only use 4 colors at a time, and this applies to both background tiles and sprite tiles--but sprite palettes are hardcoded to always use full transparency for one of those colors, so they're really limited to 3 colors.

in the context of this art, the stylized drawings of me are all background tiles using a palette of dark green, blue, brown, and beige. all of the accessories in pink, yellow, and white are drawn as sprites, allowing for greater color depth in this static art piece.

of course, i didn't draw these for actual use on an nes, i just like working within arbitrary limitations ^_^

[crappyblue]

playing around with making some smw-romhack-compatible self-insert sprites again. will i do anything with them? only time will tell...