Welcome to my personal Tumblr, or my "Canvas" as I like to call it. My art, animations, video projects, and major updates can be found here. Major projects, such as animations, may come with a blog or short story regarding their creation.
So I’m sure all of you know the issue with Tumblr right now so I’ll spare you the details. Some of you may be looking at the title of this blog and thinking why I am worried since I don’t really do any NSFW stuff. Well, there’s two reasons for that.
I never know what the future holds. I might do some NSFW content in the future, whether it’s a personal project or a commission from someone. Even though they are currently only targeting sexually explicit content, they may go after the more violent end of NSFW in the future (such as my Bendy commission from a year ago). However, the second reason is the most major one.
I follow quite a few artists on Twitter who use Tumblr quite often. Just about all of them have sent out some concerning tweets showing that a lot of their posts that aren’t even NSFW are getting flagged as well (most of them don’t even do NSFW stuff and are still getting posts flagged). So basically no one is safe from this purge, even if you don’t do NSFW stuff, because this new algorithm is just too inconsistent and... well... dumb.
Long story short, in such a short span of time, this site has become a bit too unstable for my tastes, and I might leave all-together, so I decided to make this post for those of you who only follow me here to let you all know where else you can find me (so I don’t just disappear on everyone). I probably won’t leave right away, or if things suddenly get better (which I doubt) I may not leave after all.
I’m more active on Twitter than anywhere else at https://twitter.com/JoliVector. As for blogs, I may be moving to Newgrounds, where you can find me at https://jolivector.newgrounds.com/. Of course, here are other places you can find me:
YouTube (though I’m sure this is where most of you know me from) - https://www.youtube.com/c/JoliVector
New Twitter profile pic!
This is probably my first full drawing using Clip Studio Paint and I decided to use it for an October drawing. There were quite a few hurdles with using it, such as certain tools not working the way you would expect them and such, but oh well.
So I was going to go back to Dokapon after that Chuggaaconroy animation, but around the time I finished, ProtonJon did a livestream on Metal Slug Advance and Metal Slug 3, which reminded me how much I love that series. Needless to say, I had Metal Slug on the brain for quite a while after that, so I decided to capitalize on my sudden memories with this animation.
As with most of his livestreams, Jon had co-comes in his livestream so naturally, they would be featured in this animation. I quickly realized that I had no idea what either Gex or Camille looked like so I had no idea how to portray them. For Camille, I based her appearance on a piece of stream art made by SmashToons that featured her (I’m assuming that was supposed to be her). For Gex, I had less reference so I gave him a mostly-faceless design. As for Jon, I decided to give his hair a bit of an update… :)
I continued my use of more simplistic backgrounds for this animation and started going for outline-less objects. In addition, I decided to make a bit more use of gradients, specifically black gradients, for smoke and darkness. While I’m on the subject, I decided to fully commit to removing gradients entirely from character eyes. Going back to my previous animations, the use of gradients for eyes looked a bit awkward, so beginning with the Masae animation, I started going for solid colors for eyes.
I also started using the Glow effect a bit more for this animation, although half of it is barely noticeable due to only being on screen for split-seconds.
Probably the most complex thing I did new for this animation is using imported video which I hadn’t done before. Since I couldn’t import with audio, I had to import the video and audio as separate layers and try to sync them together while also trying to sync them to when I needed them to play in the animation.
I think this time I will actually go back to Dokapon, though I have a few things I would like to try before I even begin work on it, even after my usual break after every animation.
RNG has come to haunt Chugga in more ways than one.
(I guess I just have Zelda on the brain)
There’s not really much to write about this one. The only thing I can say is that I had a bit more focus on frame-by-frame animation, specifically with the dogs. This one helped me develop my ability to see and determine proper frame rates for specific movements, again, particularly with the running dogs. And that’s about it.
Oh, and I just enjoyed how Chugga spent like an hour trying to beat the dog race mini game with the mask of truth, and Masae beat it in her let’s play on the first try just to show what the mini game was.
On a related note, this was the first project where I decided to livestream part of its production (specifically the beginning of its production). I thought about doing it again for the end, but decided against it since I thought streaming the end of the animation would be extremely spoiler heavy. I’m thinking of streaming for future projects, though I am not completely committed to livestreaming on either Twitch or YouTube, though I might stream on them both for different occasions.
Speaking of which, livestream archives will be going up on the channel, but they will only go up a few days after the respective project itself goes live to avoid spoilers.
https://www.twitch.tv/jolivector
I was thinking about going back to Dokapon for my next animation, but Proton Jon’s Metal Slug stream last night is making me reconsider. We’ll see what happens :)
I’ve been thinking about streaming these past couple of weeks (still not sure what or when), but I ended up getting the idea for this after all of that thinking.
I just realized that I never uploaded this thing here. Anyway, I remember being in the mood to make a SMW version of my avatar... and I have no idea why.
A race between the derpy chibi and the... yeti... lady... thing.
So while I was watching Tom Fawkes’s livestream archive of Breath of the Wild for my previous animation, the Twilight Princess video by MasaeAnela for this animation showed up in the suggested tab. I guess I just had Zelda on the brain around that time. Anyways, this one was kind of a scheduling nightmare. Summer is always a pretty busy time for me with all of the family trips I take throughout the months. Even so, I managed to squeeze in just enough time in my current trip to finish up the last bit of this project.
This animation and the premise provided by the video it’s based on, gave me a chance to experiment with camera movements and fast-paced movement. As a result, there was a lot of 24 fps movement in this animation, at least more than my previous animations. As I mentioned in a previous project, I prefer to use 8 and 12 fps for more casual and slow movements, while reserving 24 fps for fast-paced movements. This would save time while still looking visually pleasing. Even so, the fast-paced action in this animation required a lot of 24 fps movement. Particularly taxing was the hair movement and snow shredding as the characters slide throughout the race with only a few stops throughout.
In addition, I experimented with camera movement a bit, which I’m still questioning even now that the project is completed. The characters looked a bit stiff staying in one position, even as they tweened into new positions, as they were skiing, so the constant camera movement during these clips gave them a somewhat more dynamic look.
Unexpectedly, one of the most difficult things to do for this video was to pick which of MasaeAnela’s logos to use for the thumbnail. As I’m sure everyone has noticed by now, whenever I animate a YouTuber, I like to feature that YouTuber’s icon on the upper-right corner of the thumbnail so people know who exactly it is they are watching in animated form. However, MasaeAnela changes her icon with each new let’s play series which made featuring her icon unexpectedly confusing. So in the end I decided to use her old twilight princess chibi Masae icon since it’s relevant to the video. This pretty much got me thinking of what I should do if I ever animate a Chuggaaconroy video since he also changes his icon with each new let’s play (I might use his Xenoblade icon since the whole world is aware of his obsession).
I don’t know why, but for some reason, yesterday I was really in the mood to draw one of my OCs from a scrapped game I was working on... and this happened.
I know your pain Tom… well, except for the drunk part…
As I mentioned before, I decided to take a break from the Dokapon series. If I’m completely honest, I was beginning to feel a little burnt out with the series so I decided to break away and animate something different. And I ended up here. I remembered watching Tom’s Breath of The Wild livestreams and one of those streams really stood out (as you can tell from the animation, because he was drunk.) That whole stream was just golden, but there were far too many nuggets to put into one animated video, so I decided to focus on a major event in that stream, what he referred to as the “Spear Saga.”
This animation had the most “cutting” and “tossing” I’ve done for a project yet. Typically, when I gather audio files to animate for a project, I usually have around 8-12 and toss out around 3-5. But this time, I ended up with about 25 different audio files and tossed more than half of them. There were just too many moments and most of them could be cut since they were mainly repeats of other files. In addition, many could also be cut since there wouldn’t really be any context lost.
I ended up doing a bit more with the backgrounds than previous animations because of the scenery in Zora’s Domain, mainly that tall wall of bluish rock around it. Just to add more to the nature of the setting, I also added a fog effect to far-off background assets rising from the water in most of the clips.
Probably the hardest thing for me in this entire project was figuring out how to draw Tom’s head and face. I thought Jon’s hair was the hardest thing to portray in cartoon form, but Tom’s face was a giant question mark for me (I seriously considered just drawing him as his “TomFace” for his head and animating that at one point).
Fun little tidbit, when I finished the final scene for this project, iMovie would not open up for some reason… so that was a thing.
I mentioned on Twitter a few weeks ago that I invested in a stylus. I’ve been practicing with it since I got it, and I’m considering using it for my next animation (this one was made with a mouse just like my previous projects).
So, as I promised in yesterday’s post, here’s my commission that I had been working on throughout March.
This is my first animation commission, and it was commissioned by an old college buddy of mine who now does YouTube.
After greenlighting this project, we agreed that the animation would be purely voiceless and only visual. I was sent a rough description of what he wanted the scenario to be. According to him, the scenario he created is meant to be a symbolic prediction of the upcoming fourth chapter of Bendy and The Ink Machine.
For this animation, I made a heavy use of gradients in an attempt to capture the dark visuals of the game. In addition, I only made use of black and a slightly altered shade of yellow for the entire animation, also to coincide with the game’s aesthetic. You would think this would save a lot of work, but in actuality, it created a bit more work, namely the fact that because there were only two colors, it was easy for things to blend with each other. In certain scenes, I had to give the characters yellow outlines to make them visible when standing with a black background. In some occasions, the outlines had to be redrawn frame by frame if the character moves.
The fact that this project is meant to be a prediction of the upcoming chapter 4 created a bit of pressure in my mind, since the final video would have to be posted before the chapter’s release, otherwise the video would be pointless. It had been several months since the third chapter was released, and as someone who also works on games, I knew that it was only a matter of weeks before chapter 4 is released. When the trailer dropped two weeks ago, the pressure was really on, as at the time I was only a little over halfway done with the whole thing.
It got to the point where I started skipping to the more important scenes in the script and saving the less important scenes for later, that way if we decided to cut a few things out to release the video sooner, the major scenes would be in the video, getting the point across.
Since this was a commission for another channel, it will not be posted on my YouTube channel. In addition, the version above is only the 720p version. However, the final, 1080p version can be viewed on FGT’s channel below, along with some commentary from him afterward. Keep in mind, his channel is a Spanish-speaking channel. For those only interested in the animation, it plays from 0-3:24 of the video. For those who do speak/understand the language, he does talk about the project afterwards.
Despite the stress, I enjoyed working on this animation (I mentioned in a post from a year ago that I love the character designs in this game). I look forward to working on other commissions, though I should probably create a proper commissions post first.
The Runaway Guys Animated | Dokapon Kingdom: Episode 7 - “The Hunters & The Hunted”
It’s hunting season.
After spending about a month working on a commission for an old college buddy (which I’ll post here soon) I got back to working on personal animations and… holy shit this one went by fast. According to my spreadsheet, this animation only took 11 days to finish, making it the fastest animation I’ve made so far. I don’t know if that means I’m improving or if this animation had less of a workload.
While it is not much, this is the first animation where I actively edited the audio from the original video, moving lines of dialogue around for single scenes, particularly in the Kira scene and the last scene in this video. Essentially, I did this to create lines that fit better with the sequence that I had planned. I am not gonna lie, the sequence I came up with, particularly with the last scene, was mainly inspired by a new track I found while browsing, “Evil March” by Kevin Macleod. (Yeah, I’m doing this again: making an overly long scene just for a new awesome track I found that I fell in love with. I have a soft spot for this type of music. As before, I’m beginning to question if it was the right call.)
Since we’re on the topic, let’s talk about the last scene in this animation… I knew this was what I wanted the introduction of the Darkling to be like: in shadow and revealed by the light of lightning. Here’s the thing about the Darkling. Because there are parts that move, and parts that don’t move, and the parts that move are animated independently of each other, the entire character is divided into 7 layers: one for the head, one for the torso, one for each arm, one for each wing, and one for the eyes. I figured I could just use one layer to cover the Darkling in shadow and mask it over the 7 layers so that the “shading” layer perfectly matches the shape of the complete Darkling… unfortunately, I discovered that while creating masking layers is possible, it is not possible to mask a single layer over more than one layer. That is a feature exclusive to the more advanced editions of Toon Boom Harmony, Advanced and Premium, whereas my edition is Essentials, the most basic of the three editions. So, I had to figure out some other way to get the desired shading effect for covering up the Darkling and lightning him up when the lightning strikes, and I did… it was tedious. I have no idea how to describe what I did in words, so what I’m about to write might end up not making a lick of sense, or might seem all over the place, or both.
(Yay, I discovered the “read more” feature to shorten these things. Although I’m not sure if it works the way it implies. Upon further inspection, I realized that “read more” function takes you to my Tumblr site, which for some reason turns the bulleted list into regular paragraphs. Let me know if it’s a little hard to read the list below, and I’ll take off the “keep reading” feature here.)
At this point, the Darkling was already fully drawn, set up, and animated, so what I did was I erased all of the cells in each of the Darkling’s seven layers from Frame one, all the way to Frame 807, the frame right before the Darkling lights up for the first time. However, I took care not to erase the keyframes so that the layers are still animated and moved around.
I went to frame 808 and copied the cells for each of the seven layers and pasted their contents into 807 for each of them. Essentially copying the body parts to where they should be.
Then dragged 807 all the way to 1, filling up the void I created. This might sound pointless creating a void and then filling it again with the exact same elements that were taken away. However, this separates Frames 1-807 and Frames 808+ as separate cells which is essential to the next step.
With all of the body parts in two separate cell ranges in each layer, I selected a cell in the 1-807 range and filled the body parts with pure black color, making it look like it’s covered in shadow. Fortunately, making a change in a single cell will also apply to all of the other cells within the range so I did not have to do this for every single frame (thank god). However, it does not affect cells outside the selected cell’s range, meaning 808 and onward were unaffected. So now I had two cell ranges for each of the Darkling: 1-807 which has all of the same shapes and images but with a pure black fill color, and 808+ which have the regular fill colors. In addition, since the keyframes were left untouched, frames 1-807 were still perfectly animated as they should be. (So yeah, for the first 807 frames, there is no shading effect. The Darkling itself is actually pitch black until 808 with the eyes layered on top of everything.)
With frames 1-807 done, it was time to move on to the actual shading effect starting at 808. I created a new layer for the shading effect, placed it on top of the Darkling, and did the same thing I did earlier, copying and pasting all of the body parts and pasting them into 808 of the new shading layer.
Since 807, the last pitch black layer, and 808, the first colored layer, were essentially the same, I copied the body parts from 807 from the shading layer to save time and work from having to refill all of the body parts with black again. Also, since there was going to be no further animation from the darkling for the remainder of the animation, I was able to paste all of the body parts into a single layer, and the pure black color meant I could paste them in any order I wanted.
With the shading layer done, I duplicated it (yeah, there are two layers for the shading effect). I left one of the layers perfectly intact, while the other layer had to be painstakingly cut and erased to make parts of the Darkling light up (this would have had to be done even if I had access to the missing feature for masking layers). This was done twice so that the Darkling would be lit up from two different angles as shown in the animation.
With that done, I added a Transparency effect to both the cut up layer and the solid layer. Then, I added keyframes to the solid layer to smoothly change the transparency in sync with the lightning. This makes the solid layer disappear and revealing the cut up layer, creating the shaded effect.
It doesn’t stop there though. I noticed that the eyes were being covered by the shading layers because they had to be layered on top of everything. So I created a new layer and placed it on top of everything, including the shaded layers, and copied and pasted the eyes to it.
And I think that’s about it.
I might take a break from Dokapon Kingdom to focus on animating other videos for a while, so consider this episode a season finale of sorts. Also, there are quite a few events coming up which may or may not affect my animating/drawing time (yet to be seen).
Little tidbit: at one point there was a brief moment in the animation where “Lonely Man” would play after Jon is sulking over the escaped Wabbit. I removed it for a couple of reasons. One is that it could risk a demonetization or worse, a copyright strike. The second is that it just didn’t strike me as funny enough, and instead just felt forced.
The Runaway Guys Animated | Dokapon Kingdom: Episode 6 - “The Shark Bros.”
It’s time for some questionable haircuts.
For this animation, I decided to update the eyes for the characters. This was primarily inspired by the creation of the character, Carly, whose eyes looked a bit higher quality than that of the guys. This is what led to me giving the other characters a slight upgrade for their eyes.
In addition, I’m still experimenting with how to draw backgrounds. I mentioned before that I’m more of a character artist than a background artist (...f**k backgrounds...) so they’re always a challenge in every scene. Continuing the theme from my previous animation, I’ve continued to try and go for more simplified backgrounds. Halfway through the animation, around the third scene, I’ve started using more straight lines for the backgrounds, similar to Samurai Jack, using the Line Tool, and occasionally using the Brush Tool to manually draw backgrounds… exactly how I decide what should use straight lines and what should be manually drawn, I still haven’t figured out.
Even so, I’m still practicing backgrounds and I think I’m getting somewhere after drawing the background for the second clip in the final scene for this video.
After immortalizing an old friend, Chu- I mean, Steve must continue his journey and overcome the obstacles laid before him in his new form.
With all of my December plans done, I was able to go back to animating, although I still have a few distractions here and there.
This marks the first “skip” I’ve done with The Runaway Guys’ Dokapon let’s play. This video is primarily based on episode 7, skipping 5 and 6 (although there is one bit from episode 5 at the end).
This animation pretty much reminded me how much I hate drawing backgrounds. I spent several days watching other animations to see how other people handled backgrounds. I saw quite a lot of animators on YouTube use very simplified backgrounds, compared to the more complex characters throughout. In the end, I decided to stick with basic shapes for much of the background. In addition, I also decided to ditch giving backgrounds outlines and only gave outlines to the characters and foregrounds. I kind of like how that decision turned out.
Also, while working on this animation, I discovered a bug with Toon Boom that I encountered only once before. Apparently, on rare occasions, the audio would randomly throw itself out of sync. Fortunately, if you just close and then reopen the software, it will be fixed. Unfortunately, if you synced the animation to the audio while it was out of sync, then everything will be out of sync when it’s fixed. Fortunately, all I had to do was reposition a few frames in a few layers in order to handle this, but the outcome could have been worse.
Okay, so while I was away on vacation, I randomly got in the mood to create a more “humanoid” version of my online avatar. I have to say, I’m really proud of how it turned out, es...
I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaack... no, seriously. I’m back from my vacation.
With my studying done (for now), my test done (for now), and my traveling done (for now), I should be able to get back to animating soon, but not before I share this... thing. A few days ago, I tweeted out a sketch of something that I just randomly got the urge to work on. The full story can be read by clicking on the link, but overall, it was just me suddenly wanting to create an avatar with a bit more personality. As I mentioned in the link above, I’m not sure why I wanted to do this in the first place, I just did.
Other than that, that’s pretty much it for this piece’s story. Just something I made from a random feeling that I still can’t figure out.
Yet another “remake” of an old Miiverse drawing. This one is based on Kirby’s Sword ability.
I remember drawing and posting this while playing Kirby and The Amazing Mirror, which is easily my favorite Kirby game and my favorite metroidvania-style game. With how open that game is, in being able to go to whichever world you want in any order you want, finding and defeating bosses in any order you want, and optional power-ups scattered everywhere, it really was the Breath of the Wild of metroidvanias.
I’m pretty sure it was intentional, but Kirby’s sword ability reminded me of Link from The Legend of Zelda (probably due to the cap), which is probably what prompted me to draw this in the first place. In addition, the explorative nature of the game, and the fact that I posted this with a screenshot of Kirby standing outside a temple, further created that parallel with The Legend of Zelda. Other than that, there wasn’t much else to this drawing, at least as far as inspiration goes. It’s just a fun little thing I thought of doing at the time.
In case it wasn’t obvious from this piece and the previous one, I have pretty much given up on backgrounds outside of animations. Speaking of which, I hope to get back to animating once I get back from a Christmas trip I have planned for a couple of weeks. The weeks of studying for a test and the wait for the results, combined with all the crazy that went on last week *cough* Net Neutrality *cough* made me completely forget about my Christmas trip next week and I just recently remembered about it. I definitely won’t be able to animate anything while I’m gone and I’m not sure if I’ll even be able to draw. I’ll definitely be on Twitter as I usually am, but likely not as active due to unstable wifi at the location I’m going and my current phone plan not covering out-of-country locations (I need to get a new phone plan someday soon...).
I recently got my Miiverse post history, and it instantly brought back quite a few memories, even though I didn’t really use Miiverse at all after the first couple of years. I had forgotten about half of the random drawings I made there, but I remember this one being my favorite, and it still is.
This one is based on the character Nayru from The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages. I don’t really remember what inspired this drawing... especially that quote next to Nayru that I don’t think she ever actually said. The only thing I remember is that I enjoyed doodling on the Wii U gamepad because it was cleaner than pencil and paper, which always left a mess on my desk (this was before I got an actual tablet to draw with).
Shortly after receiving the email, I got the idea of “remaking” at least a few of them. I decided to start with this one since it’s my favorite Miiverse drawing.
As I said on Twitter... I was such a dork four years ago...
This is the first digital drawing I made using a software other than GIMP. Ever since I discovered Medibang Paint Pro, I decided to try it out, and sure enough, I really liked it. Even so, it will still be a while before I switch completely to Medibang since I will be needing an actual stylus for it since there is no Line Tool and I currently have one of those rubber-tipped styluses which rub all over the screen, making it difficult to even draw a straight line.
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