Just some feller on the internet. I write sometimes.
In constant negotiations with my ADHD.
New to drawing, trying to figure it out.
Other, less active blog: thejelloscore
Spoilers for AvA 13 below– I'm just rambling about Dark lol
Okay so here's the thing: I still really want a Dark redemption. Not because I want him to stop being evil! Not at all! It's an integral part of his character that he is destructive and smug about it. But because I'm attached to the idea of all the hollowheads working it out and being okay. I am very aware of how self-indulgent this is. Sue me /lh
Dark is looking very un-redeemable right now. I'm enjoying it! He's genuinely having so much fun being evil and causing pain and suffering. That's super interesting for a character in a series where most of the villains have a motivation for their actions, and especially interesting for a series where forgiveness has been an important part of resolutions.
However, it makes me wonder what exactly they're going to do with Dark. Obviously it's too early to tell for sure, but surely they wouldn't kill him again? After years and years of people saying they want him back, would they really make the season end in killing Dark?
And if they don't kill Dark, what on earth would happen to him? I really hope they figure out a way to redeem him, or at least leave the door open for future interactions and possibly a future redemption. (Like a reoccurring villain or something, maybe add some Purple-flavored development later on. You understand.) That might be the best option, but truly I don't know.
Further artist rambles and reflection under the cut.
This basically served as a way to explore more of the various brush presets that Krita provides. I didn't even touch the default "basic-1" preset until I started on the background, which is a first! I had a lot of fun figuring out which presets did what and how I might use them.
If I have one regret, it's that I kinda wish I had spent more time on the enemies, they look kinda underwhelming compared to everything else. By the time I'd gotten to them, I was tired and just ready to be finished. Other than that, I'm quite happy with the result. Even the background looks pretty okay!
About six months ago, I played In Stars and Time, loved every second, read some good fanfic, and moved on after a few weeks. Little did I know, the ISAT post-game obsession was merely biding its time, waiting for the right moment to strike at full force.
Fast-forward to now, and I am compelled to draw Siffrin. I've always wondered how the different crafts would be visually represented outside the confines of the combat screen, how the user's movement and weapon might factor into their use. One such headcanon is that Siffrin would sorta channel their scissors attacks through their dagger as short-range projectile-looking things.
Further artist rambles and reflection under the cut.
3 hours and 50 minutes! Either I usually waste a lot of time scratching my head over colors, or I'm getting... faster? Huh.
That cloak. Let me tell you. That cloak scared me from the beginning. I knew it was going to be a pain to figure out. And it was. The worst part was that I knew—I KNEW—I was going to have to shade it in order for it to look any good at all, and whenever I try to shade clothing I have NO CLUE WHAT I'M DOING. I was flying by the seat of my pants half the time here, drawing and filling and erasing and drawing and filling and erasing and so on. But I think I sorta figured it out? Kinda? The final thing looks pretty okay by my standards, so I'm really pleased!
THE HANDS. THE HANDS LOOK AT THOSE HANDS.
THEY LOOK GOOD! MAYBE NOT PERFECT BUT GOOD!!! You don't understand how this feels. I have taken every opportunity to skimp out on proper hands because they scare me because I suck. But since hand signs are kind of an important facet of ISAT's combat system there was no escaping it this time. And they didn't turn out looking bad! They look good! Holy crap. I am so happy.
Siffrin's fun little heeled boots—well, the singular boot I had to draw—gave me much pain and anguish. I. do not wish to talk about it.
Thank you insertdisc5 for having such useful reference sheets, they made this SO much easier than it could've been otherwise. Especially hair. I suck at hair.
Final note: the slashes were really fun to make. I like them a lot. They look nice.
Tonight, coming to you all the way from Pharloom, the FANTASTIC, the MAGNIFICENT—
TROBBIOOOO!!!
Hands down favourite character in Silksong. I love everything about about this butterfly. The design, the drama, the voice, the moves, the song, the pizazz—
Trobbio.
Further artist rambles and reflection under the cut.
Looking back, I'm kind of surprised this only took me three and a half hours, considering I had to restart a good chunk of it from scratch a good way through it. He was a little too wide, I think:
The early sketch is the only layer that was preserved in its original state, but I had already finished the clean lines and flat colors when I realized he didn't look quite right. I ended up completely erasing and redoing everything from the chest up except for the right wing, which underwent only minor modifications before being duplicated to make the left wing.
Oh, and new milestone reached: This drawing marks the first time I ever bothered to try using any of the different brushes that hang out down here in the bottom-left corner:
That's right, until now, brush presets where a completely untapped facet of this software because I didn't know how to use them and was terrified I'd change something and would have no clue how to change it back. But I finally got over it and ended up using "b) Airbrush Soft" to do some shading on the wings and upper fluff. This preset (actually most presets, after some testing) is pressure-sensitive (I am using a tablet), which I haven't had to work with before, so that was interesting. I was initially going to try to shade the fluff so as to make it look fluffier, like how he looks in promotional art—
—but after a few minutes I concluded I had no clue what I was doing and gave up. Some other time, perhaps.
As a final note: despite being rather simple, I am quite pleased with how that background looks. I was originally going to try to recreate his stage from the game, but, uh, then I didn't. 'Cause I wasn't up for it by then. But hey, the little pink flashes in the end product look nice, so I'm happy.
I felt like drawing something relatively quickly and sloppily. I did not have the energy or willpower to start a 4+ hour project I might never finish. So here's a rough and scribbly Hyperion Loader from Borderlands 2! I love these guys, I love their voice lines and I think their design is a nice balance between humanoid and not.
More artist ramblings and reflection under the cut.
This turned out surprisingly nice for something I only spent an hour on. And, like, 5-10 minutes of that was making the Hyperion logo.
Something I've come to realize is that thick, somewhat messy lines like this almost always look better than my attempts at clean ones, or at least are a LOT easier to make look good. It's tempting to make more sketchy stuff like this.
First time trying to shade with scribbles rather than with just a flat color at 50% opacity. Definitely trickier to make look good, I imagine I could've done a better job of it had I spent more time making the lines more uniform.
Pay no mind to how I sorta cheated the hand here, uh
I'm not proud of it, but I was not in the mood to fight with robot hand anatomy for 30 minutes.
I found a new thing (Epithet Erased) and with it, a new favorite character, Trixie. Just something about characters with prickly exteriors and soft interiors that really grabs me.
More artist ramblings and reflection under the cut.
Not much to say about this one. It took less than four hours, which is a bit quicker than I expected.
The boots make me happy. They look good. The knees too, they look sufficiently knobby. The mouth, after like a dozen attempts, looks like a mouth. yay
Ooh, fun thing I learned! Usually, when I'm shading, I just highlight bits in black on a separate layer and lower it's opacity to ≤50% (which has usually worked perfectly fine up until now, and is what I did for most of the shading here). BUT! Trixie's skin tone is really pale, so when I tried to shade her face and neck it ended up a coldish grey, like so:
Which didn't look quite right, so I tried shading those areas with brown rather than black and:
Huh. Looks way more like human skin. That's good to know!
I started playing the Hollow Knight games shortly after Silksong came out and discovered one of my favorite characters in the game, Nosk. I drew this sometime back in September, I think.
More artist ramblings and reflection under the cut.
Sometimes, upon finishing a drawing like this, I open it up in fullscreen after exporting it and just... stare at it, for a full minute or two, marveling at how I was able to make something like it. This was one of those times. It's far from perfect of course, but it greatly exceeded my expectations.
There are mainly two things in the final product that I'm really happy with, the first of which being the background. I don't have a lot of experience making backgrounds, and I was certain it was going to be the weakest part of the image. And while I do still end up hiding it a bit behind blur filter masks, it's... not bad? I mean obviously it isn't perfect—far from it, in hindsight it's kinda lazy—but it does the job and it isn't jarring.
The other thing I'm really happy with is the light reflecting off of Nosk's legs and claws. It looks nice, I like it.
OK LAST THING. It is so interesting to me that The Dark Lord has alwaaayss been attached to companionship. Whether it be Alan, the apps that helped him fight Chosen, The Chosen one himself. His spiders. and now Hacker.
If anyone was going wield a magic book as a weapon, it would be Dotsu.
Original character designs and further Artist Reflection under the cut.
Dotsu (The Last Dimension)
Divine Arbiter (Totally Accurate Battle Simulator)
Artist Reflection
I'm posting this 2-3 months after making it, so my memory of the process is a bit shaky, but I remember having a lot of fun figuring out the pose for this one.
Things I'm happy with:
The hair - This was the first time in a while that I'd really sat down and tried to figure out how exactly long hair is supposed to work. And y'know, I'm pretty happy with it. It's a little ribbon-like, but to me it still looks close to how hair should behave. It looks good. :)
The hands - Well, hand, singular. I still cheat my way out of having to draw as many hands as possible. That said, the one I didn't hide behind a book looks pretty okay. One of the issues I came across was that I couldn't really draw the fingers individually—the brush size made the lines too thick and looked... weird? Like, kind of crowded compared to the rest of the drawing. And I didn't want to change the brush size for this one part or the inconsistency would bug me. But it turns out less is more sometimes, and not separating the fingers actually worked somehow. Though I will admit they are far too flat against the palm, ideally they should be curled in, right? Lessons for next time!
The face - The eyes... Look like eyes! Not Henry Stickmin eyes, but actual eyes! And there's—there's a coherent facial expression! And it looks pretty okay! WOOOOO
Really though, I'm quite proud. Changing up the head shape a little from the usual made a bigger difference than I expected. Also, the teeth. Much like with the fingers, drawing a line the whole way across the mouth made it look off. Less is more.
The missiles - Those were fun. They took three layers in total: the bright white cores, the little yellow scribbles and trails, and a copy of the yellow layer with a Gaussian blur filter on top, and I think the result looks really cool.
Also, I think I did a decent job adapting the Arbiter's outfit to Dotsu's color scheme.
All in all, I rather surprised myself with how well this turned out. And in just over four and a half hours, too!
Sometimes I think a lot about what we know about The Dark Lord's character and how that may or may not relate to what he's experienced.
Like, right off the bat in AvA 3, this is a guy whose life starts during a currently ongoing fight, is told that his purpose is to join that fight, and when he loses, is prompted to start fighting again. For the first 5 minutes of his existence, the only thing he is exposed to is violence.
I think about how his first instinct in Minecraft is to destroy everything even when Chosen has already discovered that there's another way they can interact with the world. I recall how in AvA 3 when he starts playing Minesweeper, the one and only time he tries engaging with something non-destructively, it ends up biting him in the ass. How much later, the very first time he creates something—even if it is a means to further destruction—he gets told it's wrong.
I think about how, when Chosen spares him, he doesn't tell Dark that trying to kill him is wrong, he points to their uncaring creator. The lesson isn't "Fighting is wrong", it's "Don't get tricked into fighting for someone else's benefit." I wonder how it felt when that same person told him he needed to stop fighting. For someone else's benefit. The one person he stops fighting for years suddenly switches sides without any prior warning.
This is probably all verging on headcanon, but...
His reason for being is violence and conflict. He finds combat fun and exhilarating, but combat for him has always been with the aim to destroy. Nothing has ever taught him that an alternative to destruction is anything good. He has been thoroughly conditioned to be the way he is.
God I wanna see a redemption arc for him done well. What would it take to bring out the parts of him that built such a versatile tool like the Virabots, that started playing with a logic puzzle in the middle of a fight, that saw beauty in the hellish pre-1.16 Nether, and channel them into something good? What kind of person would he be afterwards?
Like he was created only for a tool to destroy then he left his mission just for a guy that doesnt even love him back he spends eight fucking years to create a whole ass virus only for it to destroyed last than a day then got blasted by a kid that he doesnt even know
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
If there's two things I love, it's shapeshifting and robots. Mercury here combines those pleasures as a sentient collective of nano-machines, whose form changes at will.
Here's some earlier, unpolished drawings I did to feel out the way to draw them:
[Some more art-process-ramblings under the cut.]
"How do I do this" "WHAT do I even draw for this" and Similar Struggles
This is the second time I've tried to actually render an original character, and I'm not sure if it was easier or harder than the tornado triplets. On one hand, a blob-y form means I don't necessarily need to worry about drawing perfect curves or straight lines. On the other hand, I need to figure out more forms to actually draw, which is more figuring out how to convey different unconventional shapes, which was rather challenging.
For example, the "slug form" in the second image was actually the 3rd shape I'd tried to draw. The first was the wormy blob shape in the first image, but it was hard to figure out and I gave up on it until much later; and the second was sort of like a that one pokemon Grimer, but without the arms and instead of the face it just had that big, black lens.
Likewise, that 3rd form in the second image with the spinny sharpness is also my second attempt at drawing a sort of "angry" form. My first idea was more of a writhing mass of tentacles and long sharp spikes, but I couldn't wrap my head around how to draw that without it looking... off, somehow. Like it was too off-center, or seemed to be weighted strangely, and it just—it didn't work.
Conveying a 3d Noodle
So remember how I said the "wormy blob shape" was hard to figure out? The reason for this, as it turns out, is that if all you only draw the outline of a curved noodle facing the viewer, it doesn't actually look like it, it just looks like a shorter, slightly misshapen noodle facing to the left:
It took me a while to figure out that you gotta add side details that curve around out of sight in order for it to work.
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