Burdened By Images

Iz/Tal/Sheep, queer artist (he/they/it) and alleged Hollow Knight fan. This is my main art blog, been here since 2017. I do a lot of conceptual stuff. Occasionally I'll go a month or two without posting only to then drop like six images & ten paragraphs of associated lore all in one post. ☀︎My Carrd☀︎ ☀︎Portfolio/Website☀︎ ☀︎DeviantArt☀︎ ☀︎Artfight☀︎ ☀︎Paypal☀︎ ☀︎Redbubble☀︎

[lonelysheepling]

Art information (will be updated overtime)

For the curious: my tags, the brushes I use, misc links, and some resources for artists. The main program I use for my work is Procreate; when making traditional art I normally default to either graphite or acrylic

All the listed tags are also tagged on this post, so you can just click them to immediately view all my posts for that tag—assuming you can do that on the app, idk I use mobile browser

Links:

Non-art Instagram

Side blog: @safetyqualifiedminnow

Commission Info

“Can I do [x] with your art?”

Ao3 Works:

[G] Collection of Hollow Knight Fanart

All the fanart I’ve created for Hollow Knight from 2020-present

[T] Lonely Sheepling’s Assorted Fandom Artwork

Collection of all my digital & traditional fanart from 2019-present

[M] Lonely Sheepling’s Non-Fandom Artwork

Collection of my non-fandom, digital & traditional art from 2020-present

My main tags:

reblog: reblogs (retired, reblogs are now my side blog)

good lines: art reblogs (retired, reblogs are now on my side blog)

art tag: my art

fanart: what is says on the tin

digital art: artworks created digitally (2D & 3D)

traditional art: traditional artworks (paintings, sketches, crafts)

not art related: unconnected ramblings

somewhat art related: ramblings related to art

art info tag: information about my art, art tutorials, artist references, etc.

Challenge specific tags:

October challenges: ink and matcha, cringetober 2023, dressuptober

Artfight: artfight [choose one: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025]

mermay 2021

What Brushes I Use/Recommend:

JingSketch Basic 10 brush pack

Grain collection by Miksks: Volume 1 & Volume 2

30 Procreate Jewelry Brushes by NaomiArtsCreations

Dynamic Retro & Pixel Brushes for Procreate by CozyBrushery

Lace Brush Pack by KsTumanova

50 Paper Texture Brushes by LivvyDolphinArt

Devin Elle Kurtz’s brush packs: City | Foliage & Grass | Grass & Field | Bookshelf Books | Clouds

Useful Resources:

Color palettes: @color-palettes

Poses & free stock photos: AdorkaStock & Pixabay

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In honor of Make A Terrible Comic Day, here’s some hk/ss comics I made

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Apropos of nothing, here's some room screenshots from Saint's Steaming Edifice

Graffiti under the cut (spoiler for the hidden region in the Shrouded Assembly region collection)

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I’m doing artfight again this year

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I’ve added The Wanderer, Scholar, Friend, and Twinbird to my characters. There’s also some more backstory for them in their profiles if you’re interested.

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I’m doing artfight again this year

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The Wanderer AU (part 4)

Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3

The Kin who chose to leave to the void sea. This is the part of the AU where I’m pulling inspiration from both RichardSullivan’s “Iterations on Rainworld” (mainly in how I’m defining Saint in relation to the Void Worms), as well as Buddhist teachings. My take on void ascension is slightly different from Iterations on Rainworld.

I’m putting this under the cut because it’s long and theological

The Void Worms act as the final barrier between true enlightenment, they guide those who are ready to the innermost core of the void. Once the ultimate truth is revealed the individual fully ascends, transcending the cycle. Otherwise the individual has their body dissolved in void fluid while their self remains as an echo. In this regard, the way to achieve ascension is to reach enlightenment (Karma 10), descend into the void sea, pass the layer of dissolution, and witness the ultimate truth and the dissolution of the self. All other forms of “void fluid ascension” just create echoes, void spawn, and ripple spawn. This is because the body is not the self (the self isn’t real, you need to realize that in order to achieve ascension). When you dissolve your body in void fluid with the intention of ascending and you have not realized the impermanence of the self then you’ll remain even after your body is gone.

Nothing is permanent, all things are transitory and unstable. In essence, ascension is a permanent state, free from the suffering/dissatisfaction of the cycle and the existence of the self (anicca, dukkha, anatta). The process of enlightenment I’m working with loosely follows the Four Noble Truths as well as the Noble Eightfold Path, rather than the 5 Principle Urges we see in canon. But the road towards ascension can many forms (depending on the school of thought).

The Judge (or The Dreamer) comes to individuals in their dreams and grants insight and wisdom, so that the individual may ascend properly. They also guide echoes and provide pathways to the depths for void/ripple spawn.

The Weaver has little interest in ascension, choosing instead to monitor the ripplespace, remove aberrations, and stitch rifts. They chose the Watcher as their successor and guided their path from start to finish. The Watcher got to learn about ascension/echoes, the consequences of rift opening (the spread of aberrations or sentient rot), and choice. Post-apotheosis, they will take over from the Weaver, allowing the Weaver to return to the void sea to swim with their kin.

The Saint is the youngest of the original three void kin. They chose to leave the void sea out of their desire to help ascend the lesser. Their method reveals all truths necessary for ascension, allowing the target to reach enlightenment and fully ascend. This method does not leave echoes. Their ascetic nature led to them taking up a much smaller and more demure form. They fill a role similar to that of a bodhisattva.

Taming the Evil Serpent (41-53). This is too long to quote here but this is sort of the path that I’m striving to emulate with Saint.

Most of the Watcher and Saint’s journey is more symbolic than literal. The rot (rotted regions & rot worm) being a symbol of the dangers caused by melding/tearing open gateways between different realities (ripples in a pond). Rubicon being a psychological construction—saint ascending their original body and restarting their cycle once more.

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The Wanderer AU (part 3)

Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 4

Twinbird (nickname), head engineer of the 30 northern iterators (the final generation of iterators)

Twinbird is an ancient who belongs to an esoteric school of thought that promoted rapid spiritual awakening via methods considered taboo by the final dynasty of The People. She nevertheless still had a rather high ranking position in the House of Engineers because of her skills in the construction of Iterators (both in her current and prior incarnation). She chose to stay behind, after the project was cancelled, as one of the 60 maintenance engineers for the 30 iterators (even as those engineers began to leave). When mass ascension occurred they left her behind (it is unclear whether this was intentional or accidental).

Rapidly developed, with no intention of supporting a city population, for the sole purpose of there being more iterators working on the Great Problem. These 30 Iterators were designed to operate with minimal oversight and maintenance, having dedicated maintenance modules and drones. Their structure takes the shape of a truncated pyramid with their communication spires positioned at the very top. They’re less bound by taboos than their peers, which has earned them some ire from their fellow iterators. Ostracized from their own community they eventually cut off their communications to the wider network before re-opening them later on (after the global communication collapse) to communicate with Fractured Edifice. Later on, with Twinbird’s help, they would go on to fully remove all traces of the taboos from their systems. The 30 iterators (often called the 30 prisms) lack puppets (unnecessary for their role) or full names (their original names were just the number in the order of when they were built). After mass ascension they would go on to represent themselves with symbols and assign themselves nouns to go along with their numbers. All symbols are in the 3rd image above (potentially subject to change).

Full list of names at the bottom below the cut

30 Iterators

First Prism (only one of them to not use their literal number), 2 Stems, 3 Rivers, 4 Feathers, 5 Beads, 6 Strings, 7 Acorns, 8 Folds, 9 Eels, 10 Hymns

11 Coasts, 12 Musings, 13 Fields, 14 Leaves, 15 Trees, 16 Needles, 17 Spears, 18 Nectars, 19 Shards, 20 Moons

21 Signals (location of Signal Spires), 22 Suns, 23 Stars, 24 Manifests, 25 Roots, 26 Engravings, 27 Poems, 28 Reeds, 29 Tethers, 30 Truncations

Other Iterators:

Virulent Acidulation

Taciturn Sunrise, Fractured Edifice, Eight Ball Bearings, Rapid Enumerations

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The Wanderer AU (part 2)

Part 1 • Part 3 • Part 4

The Southeast Coast Group is an iterator group consisting of 5 iterators: Falling Stars (deceased), Undersea Ultraviolet, Scattered Sights, Rivers Under Rapids, and their group senior, Lost in Salient Depths. Most of the iterators in this group are positioned out in the sea, with a majority of their facilities being underneath their structures. All iterators in this group minus FS and UU have removed their taboos. Scattered Sights and Rivers also have an active citizenry composed of scavengers and slugcats. Some of RuR’s council members are depicted above.

SS and RuR, after they broke their taboos, began constructing a massive, underwater transportation line. The port which it connects to at the coastline is the location of the Watcher DLC Stormy Coast (although it’s more maintained in this AU). Going from the coast to Rivers Under Rapids can take a cycle or two. In terms of maintenance, both RuR and SS have plenty of autonomous maintenance organisms to maintain their legs so they don’t collapse, they’ve also heavily modified their structures to better withstand the passage of time.

LiSD intentionally sunk a majority of their can underwater at one point in order to bypass the poor construction of their legs (which were not designed to withstand thousands of years of saltwater, even with regular maintenance). They also have modified and deconstructed large sections of their internal and external structure. They do not care about the Triple Affirmative and have instead focused their efforts on aiding their fellow group iterators and constructing satellites. LiSD has an intense hatred for their benefactors (unrelated to mass-ascension). Which causes them to come into tense conflict with The Wanderer and their family after discovering them by accident during a routine terrain scan. LiSD views the Wanderer as a threat to their independence and can be pretty openly hostile about it. The two don’t get along, despite RuR and SS advocating for them.

Iterator groups and concept stuff below the cut:

Group Senior

Iterators (Youngest ——> Oldest)

———

Seeking Mouse

Glass Musings, Bell of Gesture, Never Grasp Indigo, Distant Shattered Star

Red Tinted Tailwinds

Boundless Absolution, Perception of Lavender, Beneath Green Skies, Gilded Atlas

Heavenly Reclamation

Astral Aberrations, Questioning Rote, Latent Observations, Radiant Alms

Wandering Omen

Pleading Intellect, Forgotten Entropy, Halved Forest, Golden Leaves Fluttering

Looks to the Moon

Five Pebbles, Unparalleled Innocence, No Significant Harassment, Seven Red Suns, Chasing Wind

Falling Dust

Sliver of Straw, Intrepid Horizons, Epoch of Clouds, Winding Current

Secluded Instinct

Tailored Autumns, Gazing Stars, Endless Lands Unsung, Rind of Refuse

Lost in Salient Depths

Rivers Under Rapids, Falling Stars, Scattered Sights, Undersea Ultraviolet

Some of these names come from or are inspired by RichardSullivan’s Rainworld fic “Iterations on Rain World” which you should to read now 🫵

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

I also took naming inspiration from The Mast and some of the iterator abbreviations we see in Downpour.

I should clarify that I listed the Group seniors by oldest (Seeking Mouse) to youngest (Lost in Salient Depths) but some of the non-senior iterators are chronologically older (ex. Chasing Wind was built before Lost in Salient Depths) they’re just not seniors within their local group.

And finally here’s my rough attempt at calculating the size of an iterator

I’ve seen people posit 3km at a height for iterators (based on cloud ceilings) but clouds can go much higher (depending on climate) and iterators are often described as mountains. So I made them really fucking tall. The problem with making them shorter is that for every km you lower them you also have to scale down their width/length which affects how large their metropolises can be. All of this is just rough estimates though.

Also, yes, I’m using metric instead of imperial. It’s just a better system for this :/

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The Wanderer AU (part 1)

Part 2 • Part 3 • Part 4

The Wanderer is an Ancient who fled mass ascension and chose to wander the wastes. They reject void-fluid ascension, viewing it as oblivion and not true ascension. They’re joined in their travels by their companions Tulip, Scholar, and Friend.

Other allies and connections include the eccentric cartographers Second Sun and The Traveler, a lonely slugcat called The Martyr, and Red Acres (a miros vulture they befriended). The Courier and their mount (Swaying Grass) are employed by the Iterator Scattered Sights to manually deliver messages between himself and Chasing Winds. The Wanderer is eventually discovered by Scattered Sights’ group senior, who ends up creating The Outlaw to target them and keep them away from their group. More on that in part 2.

The climate collapse causes The Wanderer to slowly develop feathers, as a way to shield themself against the cold. Scholar (a coastal slugcat) has the standard insulating layer of fat, Friend (a west-central slugcat) has a thick layer of fur, and Tulip is just built different (better).

The Wanderer uses yeek furs, (dyed) large moth pelts, lizard hide, and red centipede armor plates as their main clothing materials. They still have some of their old jewelry but they ditched their original mask a long time ago. Their current mask (the raindeer skull) was given to them by a scavenger chieftain as a reward for honorable service. The pearls are all blank, only scholar gets to carry the data pearls.

Concept images and drafts below the cut:

I used the Karma IV mural as a literal height reference and then pinned multiple entities in arena mode and measured them with blue fruit for this. And yes, I subscribe to the tall ancient agenda. It makes more sense for me if Slugcats are actually cat sized in comparison to them.

The iterator puppets being so small in comparison to the ancients doesn’t particularly matter to me since I imagine there were likely very few instances in which an ancient would’ve actually been in the room with the iterator’s puppet. They probably just teleconferenced everything, and all you really need is an avatar (a hand puppet) for that, it doesn’t need to be life-sized.

Also, here’s my horrible first draft of the above image:

My concept for how the ancients looked is partially inspired by Reddit User ArtisticDragon1292’s Interpretation (as well as the Karma III mural). I made the beaks a bit smaller though. Here’s some of my initial sketches

Also my first pass on the Courier

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I’ve queued up 4 posts for an AU I’ve been working on for a few months (there’s like 18 images in total so I had to stagger them up)

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Ozymandias

(This is a neography)

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This is my contribution to pride month this year. This idea has almost certainly already been done before but what I lack in creativity I make up for in extremely rushed line work

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The Watcher

Some quick post-apotheosis!Watcher fanart while I finish up the fifty other Rainworld things on my list

I feel like everything I’ve been working on lately has been taking forever but I somehow busted this entire piece out in just under an hour (according to Procreate)

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Dear god I need tomorrow to arrive faster so I can play video games again

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When you sink your teeth into a really good piece of fruit

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Tumblr wasn’t letting me upload my abstract art piece and I just assumed that the file size must’ve been too big or something, so I went to export it as a JPEG and I need someone to explain to me why the estimation for the JPEG export is larger than the PNG one

I’m not an expert on file formats, but I don’t think that’s how that’s supposed to work

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My food doc is going well so far