MASTAFRAN SKETCHBOOK

The Sketchblog of Ryan Francis

[mastafran]

A doodle of a raccoon with spine problems who's making waves online at the moment.

[mastafran]

Made a stupid bra strap meme of my never-drawn OC Olivia surviving from a rough fight. It’s not much but, I’m getting over a slight art block while using my Moveinkpad more.

[mastafran]

No One: Me: What if dog anthros had lower hanging jowls?

[coolcomicbookcovers]

[power-chords]

This Dan Piraro comic always makes me cry.

[mastafran]

Bowser Resprite I started on Mar10 day, but finished today.

[mastafran]

I'm slowly plugging away at these cutscenes for Blackmask. Lots of things in my have been calling for my attention such as like taking care of my family and all that.

[mastafran]

Blackmask Placeholder Assets

I saw a Kotaku Article the other day about game devs using human made placeholder assets over Artificial Intelligence and I wanted to post a small reply assuring you all that my programmer and I are doing actual work.

My placeholder assets for Blackmask, are just the pixel art I made in color for my programmer’s sake. Half the reason I don’t show gameplay updates anywhere because it doesn’t match with the image of the game I wanted to convey to the public. Everything else is literally my own artwork, as I’m the sole concept artist, environment artist, main animator, and writer of this game.

I compile my daily five minute sketches from my sketchbook into an animation map for later reference for pixel animations. I do this for both player animations and enemy animations.It’s insane to me how people an post rendered paintings and call them sketches! Am I not as skilled as I think I am?

When prepping bosses and design, my programmer and I chat in Discord about what kind of gameplay and gimmicks should be in. With that, I sketch proposed enemy movements and sketches of the map layouts of the boss arena. I do this with little consideration for difficulty or game balance because I’m more hands off about that stuff, until I have a controller in my hands to test things out.

I post on my daily sketches on my BlueSky account as ideas for Blackmask. The art I post is not reflective of the final game, because I can’t guarantee what I draw can be implemented in engine by my programmer, or if it’s even fun in a game sense. I’m more worried I’ll change and idea later when I have a better idea.

[mastafran]

Here's a mock up of Nad Greentail's boss introduction for Blackmask! I certainly want to convey that he's more cunning that either his fox, weasel or bear underlings, and will give Cole hell if not taken seriously.

[mastafran]

I was a guest on the Cartoonist By Night podcast, drawing with the nice folks while chatting about my start as an artist, my foray into indie gaming, and my general love of retro gaming.

Here's the Final Fantasy pixel art I started during the podcast! I liked working this so much, that I'm cooking something more with this for the near future!

[bratzdollsasha]

Reblog if you’re black tumblr

and yes you have to be black, this isn’t an all access typa club

[cuties-in-codices]

muhammad's ascension to heaven (1. muhammad visits the hell for misers; 2. muhammad's encounter with an angel in the shape of a gigantic white cock who keeps track of time and calls the faithful to prayer; 3. muhammad at the gates of hell)

miniatures from a copy of mahmud al-bulgari's nahj al-faradis (the paths of paradise), a work dealing with the prophet muhammad’s mystical ascension to heaven, which takes him to both paradise and hell. on his journey, muhammad is mounted on the winged creature buraq and accompanied by the archangel gabriel/jibril. this particular (since dismembered) manuscript was commissioned by the timurid ruler abu said mirza and created by al-sarai in herat (timurid empire, modern day afghanistan), c. 1465

sources: Copenhagen, The David Collection, Inv. 13/2012, Inv. 14/2014; Christie's

[mastafran]

Drew these as 30 min cool down sketches

[aukkenopsia]

birdfolks

[oakendesk]

Doc Savage Apr 1938

Emery Clarke

[vulkiri]

🌈

[graphic--horde]

How do you make your stamps? :0

Disclaimer: this is an obscenely long explanation, with pictures. Efficiency is stupid

So, for the static ones, I make a 99x56 px file on ibis paint x. Other programs are probably available online but I don't use them.

After that, I either upload an image I want to make into a stamp, or I draw one.

Then, I find a frame I want to use. Ill upload them here but let it be known I stole all of these right from deviantart

Most of them are from Lil-Devil-Melii on deviantart. The rest i have no idea. They're not all 99x56px but you can crop the canvas it's fine

Make sure to erase the edges of the picture , so they're transparent. It's not as cute otherwise

Upload those frames over your image in whatever art program you're using and viola, stamp.

For moving ones, it's a lot harder. Mostly because I refuse to download Photoshop.

There are a couple ways to do this. Some are simple animations, like with flashing text and whatnot. For these, you download the individual animation frames from your art program. Make sure it's transparent.

Then, upload each frame to ezgif.com under the option "GIF maker." You can play around with how fast each frame goes and whatnot but in the end, it'll be a stamp with some rad text that moves. This is easy, and doesn't make me want to shit my pants and cry. If you're new, do this. This is fun. This is good. This does not kill me inside

I made that↓ stamp with this method :)

this next one is how we turn gifs into stamps. This one makes me sad. It involves math and sucks. But we gotta do it. For the vibe

First, grab your gif. I'm using this cow gif because it's awesome

Then, I resize it using ezgif. Literally everything for this will be using ezgif. I am a simple man

At this point you should decide what frame to use. I'm using this one because its the first one I clicked

Figured out what size the inside of the frame is. That's what I resize the gif to, so the edges can be transparent. The inside of this one is 93x50 px, so those are the dimensions I'm making the gif.

Figure it out by putting the frame into ibis paint and realizing the canvas to fit just the inside of the frame, then seeing what the dimensions are. But there could be easier ways

Woah it's so small now

Then, still on ezgif, I go to the "crop" option.

Make sureeee to upload the smaller gif

press the button that says "extend canvas size", and then put the "width" and "height" as the dimensions for your FRAME. This'll put a bit of a transparent border around the gif. For this frame, I did 99px and 56px.

The "left" and "top" boxes show how many pixels the cropping happens from the edges of the canvas. The formula for finding that is

(width of gif / 2) - (difference between gif width and frame width / 2) = left box

For me it's (93 / 2) - (6 / 2) = 43.5

Then you do the same.for the height, which for me ends up being 22 from the top

This is reallyyy touchy and annoying though

Here's my result , with no visible difference

Okay so THEN you go to the "overlay" option, under "effects." And upload your frame. If the cropping was done right, you shouldn't have to move the frame at all and can just download it

Here's my result:

if you don't care about transparency, you can resize your gif to be the same size as the frame, and then put the frame over it. But I'm a slut for transparency

Anyways. I'm sorry if anything was unclear, it's two am. And I hope this was helpful :) these really are fun to make once you get it down

also if anyone has an easier way to make stamps from gifs, please god tell me