So this is a place where I keep the drawings that I make while practicing. I already got some experience with drawing and animating with pixel art but none with traditional drawing.
And as I'm starting to forget the sequence and details about each of this drawings, I wanted a place to post them and write my thoughts on them.
Think like a drawing diary. Only that this one is public, and anyone can seeā¦ it's anonymous, so whathever.
I don't mind people seeing this, but sharing my drawings is not the main goal of this blog either. In the future I'll consider using this blog for other things, like posting them in groups and etc.
I've been practicing for more than 2 mounths already, and to avoid spending too much time here (like I am right now creating this blog :T ) I'll post them gradually until I catch up.
Oh, of course my drawings until now are mostly pokemons, redrawing their official arts. And probably will be for a while, they are great to get used to drawing, easy to understand with their basic shapes and there are SO MANY POKEMONS that I will never run out of material.
So it's been a while since I thought about posting my old pixel arts, that I made while practicing and for projects that I never finished (or didn't even begin :V). Feels like a waste to leave them in my PC and as I this tumblr lost the focus in only my drawings a while ago, feels apropriate to post them here.
The quantity is enormous as they date back to 2021 when I started trying piskel and drawing my first animations.
I will try to post them in chronological order and post them slowly over multiple posts instead of everything (everywhere) all at once.
The problem, of course, is how often I will be able to make this posts (doesn't help that I will have to dig into the mess of my old files, organize them, export and finally post them here). Because after raising my workload in my dayjob, it became impossible just to draw a little everyday and I haven't started typing the next comic review (shit I'm not being able to even read comics this month). This is so depressing, this extra money better be worth it, because I'm hating it.
Oh boy it's been some time, got stuck making this drawing and didn't manage to work on it properly this entire month, feels ridiculous thinking about it now. To be fair I basically finished the drawing in, around 4 days, but I stopped drawing and it took me the rest of the month to finish it. A few days ago I decided once and for all to work on it and in 2 days I retouched the colors and made the shadows and the background.
After the last Wingspan sketches I wanted to turn one of them into a complete drawing and I choose the Torchic kicking. But I was not very happy with how it was looking and kept thinking that the sketch looked better. After that I kept avoiding to work on it again for the first week and later I was not very disposed to draw in the end of the day teh rest of the month (I was in a bad mood [and a little depressed] the entire month so that also didn't help, and I was also putting a lot of extra time in my side project).
But after avoiding and draging I finally decided to just finish it once and for all, without making any correction or redrawing anything. So I started imediatly coloring and making the shadows. In the end it doesn't look as bad as I thought. To be fair the shadows are carrying a lot in this drawing and the the fire managed to hide the leg and the rest of the body (even if it looks a little off, the blur brush was a double edge sword), and the shadows helps the drawing look less flat and more interesting.
But well after almost a full month with this drawing waiting to be finished it's done and it ended better than I thought (that's not much, as my expectations were very low with this one). But let's hope I can reserve time to draw coming foward, now that I'm working 3/4 period instead of part-time I feel like I don't have time to do anything in my day anymore beside my work and side project (shit i thought I didn't have enought time when I was working part time).
It's been a while since I made a drew Pokemon's official arts, so back to one I've been considerind to draw but never started because it seemed pretty hard, the full metal Corvidae, Corviknight.
So starting with the head, it felt a little hopeless from the start, but I tried not to dwindle too much in the details in the beggining and focused in the general form first. After finishing the head the body felt pretty stright foward to draw (even if I had no idea how to begin with the wings) . The last part was the feet taht took quite a while, longer than the head, and I had to make a lot of ajustments to it's size and lenght.
In the end I decided to play a little with color, painting the entire background purple, and coloring over it with the white colors. I got a little too much into the shading and made more than I should. Saddly the light and shadow look different because I used different brushes. As I used the tripple brush for the white color.
It looks fine, of couse a missed a lot of things while drawing (I also didn't try to correct a lot of those things like I usually did), like the head is smaller, the chest armour should be lower and the right leg is bigger (bigger than the left one that it's closer so it make it look very off). And as I said before the shading looks cool but a little off because of the difference in the dark and light brushes :T.
Overall I liked this drawing and it didn't took so long, around 4 days (but didn't work a lot on it some days, so I would consider it a 3 day drawing), the only part of me that's a little dissapointed is because the original art make some things with the color of the armor and I decided to only use black and white for the shadows and light reflections :T
Back to more sketches, I still wanted to make more sketches with Team Wingspan and this time I wanted to draw more with both of them together and try some diferent things with poses.
It's a lot of drawings and the time for each one varied a lot, some like the top right was super fast but others like the one with Psyduck receiving the stomach punch a lot more time, as I tried to figure out how I was going to draw the body with him being trown upward by the punch.
One think that I managed to practice a lot with this sketches is how to draw diferent mouth expressions with beaks, feels wrong to bend the beaks like that, but I think this is the best (and maybe the only way) way to draw them, another way that I could try is drawing a mouth after the beak, like how "Milos From Home" does with Riley. Don't know if that is anatomically correct but gives way more liberty with mouth expressions.
The only drawing I'm not happy about is the Torchic facing foward with the trail of fire, I didn't know how to draw the other leg and the drawing looks off in general. The same pose but in profile looks way better.
Besides that one, I like all of them and it's hard to pick a favorite, maybe the sad, sleep depraved Psyduck and the kicking Torchic.
One think that it's annoying me a little is the inconsistent with Torchics size when both are together, in most he is half Psyduck's size, but in others he is 1/3 and the top left one his head is super tiny (I also have no idea how he is supose to be supporting himself in Psyducks back... at least it looks cute).
Well after finishing Repeat I turn to the second author of Rabbit on The Moon, and responsible for the gorgeous art of that comic āNittehā. I choose Repeat first because, despite the better looking art from Level X, by the description alone Repeat sounded more interesting.
SPOILERS AHEAD. Recommend just reading the conclusion if you didnāt read the comic yet:
Well, first the good. The comic is pretty, I like the art style, the characters designs are very cool, despite all being cat/dog characters they look very unique especially, my favorite, the fish/orca dude. Visually the comic is great, not to the level of Rabbit on The Moon, but still has a lot of cool and very pretty panels. Another thing that I like in this comic is the fight scenes. It is a relatively short comic so it doesn't have a lot of them, but the fights are very exciting, especially the first ones where they fight a pack of wolves and the hunters.
I think the only thing that was very confusing while I was reading is when they died and respawned. The count of their lives is very important as they are on their last ones and, a huge point in the story, is that they donāt know what will happen when their life reaches zero. And a lot of the times is not very clear when that happened, as the visual indication that they died was not always clear and sometimes they seemed to die without suffering from critical injuries (canāt deny the author could go more dramatic with the injuries, just to be clear when itās fatal). The indication of respawn doesnāt help, showing an outline of them in a panel and they are back in the next panel. Funny thing, for a long part of the comic I actually thought that a character had invisibility and she was using it during a fight, but she was respawing :V (I only noticed that, when other characters died and showed them respawning, WAIT they can also go invisible? ā¦ wait, that guy received a spear in the face and was clearly deadā¦ā¦ā¦ she was dying back their?).
So, about the story, the general plot is fine, Iāll say itās not very unique but thatās not a very a huge issue (Iām also a little demanding with uniqueness of the stories, so I try not to judge so harshly in this aspect, especially because coming with unique stories is not easy and is relative, as it depends of how much of this type of stories I personally saw). The players stuck in a video-game is a commonly used plot, additionally they donāt have any memories before getting stuck in the game so it adds some mysteries to the story.
The story does suffer a great shift in the middle to focus more on Amberās... social issues and it ends being a main plot point forward to the end of the comic. I did felt like it came out of nowhere, but still have time for us to see the growing rupture between her and the team, turning herself against everyone in the group and making that everyone there doesnāt care about her. Letās say that it started at 50 and raised to 100 by the end, you can see this growing but it started a little to sudden. I did like this change of the story especially because how it started, with Amber alone meting and getting the trust of orca dude, just for them to push each other apart and later for Amber to push everyone away. This conflict is a little nuanced too, because despite Amber pushing orca dude away he also didnāt reacted very well when the cracks started to form, being even a little apathetic towards Amber sometimes.
To be fair everyone of the 4 human characters have their issues (kinda messed up gang if you ask me) that creates conflicts in the group, but not to a point for it to becomes a soup opera and turn the attention away from the main story.
Now I start talking about some of the problems, first is sometimes the way some conflicts happened are a little off, a minor example could be Amber hostility towards orca dude (I canāt find his name, Iām just gonna use orca dude) the beginning of it kinda came out too fast (they were great pals and after a single bad event [that is nobodies fault] she hates him and he answer being indifferent to her), but I donāt think is that bad. A more significant and very confusing one is the fight between Snow and Jazz (the two other humans that formed a romantic relationship in the game), it really started out of nowhere and I was suuuuper confused, in short:
- Jazz: āWhat if only one player can survive and I we have to kill each other?ā,
- Snow: āWould you really kill me?ā
- Jazz: āā¦ā
- Snow: āI CANāT LET YOU KILL ME, so Iām gonna freeze trap you here and leaveā
A little resume of course but it wasā¦ something, to be fair this was the worst moment that I could complain about the writing. Doesnāt help that after Snow is unfreezed, she immediately encounters Jazz again and they are indifferent to each otherā¦ I was expecting another fight but they just seemed upset with each other, barely looking at each other.
A second complain is with the plot overall, the thing is, they are in an experimental game, SAO style (but with dogs and cats :V), that promises a price when they finished based on how many lives they have left by the end. The problem is that they lost their memories and they canāt force them out of the game. Ok, but thatās a problemā¦ there is a mysterious figure that appears and is not very clear of his motives. That dude is the developer of the game... and I have no idea what he was up to, his intention was to get them out of the game and with that in mind, I have zero idea why he didnāt just told everything to them. He is always mysterious and seems like the villain of the story. I do get the feeling that the author decided to change the story latter on, and to do that she had to change this characters, but it make it very confusing.
The comic also have is other confusing things in the story like: Whatās with the green eye power from Amber? Why they got out of the game after killing her in the enraged state? Was all of that quest they made useless? Again this all could be because of story changes, maybe also to finish the comic earlier than expected, as I get the feeling that the ending came too soon.
Oooooooooof, I hate when my criticism are so long like this and creates the impression that I didnāt like the comic. But itās quite the opposite, even with this problems in the story itās still interesting, with the mystery about the game, the relationship of the characters, the fights and the conclusion of the comic. I guess is easier to get a huge text criticizing something, trying to figure out what was wrong and making jokes about it, than talking about things that I liked (or maybe itās me). Despite this problems, I still liked the story and I liked even more the visuals of the comic.
Conclusion: I liked this comic. Personally, the visuals, character designs (mostly the main characters) and the fights are the main sell of this comic. The comic have some beautiful panels and some fights are very exciting. The story is a little generic with itās main plot, but it manages to turn this around and develops some unique elements after the second half of the comic. My criticism with the comic is with the writing, I felt like there were some noticeable plotholes in the story, some elements that are never fully explained and there is very few moments in the comic, with the moments between characters, that didnāt made a lot of sense and felt rushed and confusing.
I feel like (I like to guess what was in the authors head when doing something, but Iām aware itās a huge speculation of my part) this rushed moments and ploholes in the comic could be a result of late changes in the story of the comic, to finish it early. Because I felt like the comic was setting up a lot of things to reveal later, but wrapped everything up too early and discarded or changed a lot of them to fit the new direction of the story.
After sketching this guys I dedided to make a more elaborate drawing with both of them. Made a quick sketch and decided to finish it with colors and shading. Made 2 versions, the first with only the color of the shadows, because I liked how it looks, and the one with all the color.
Took me 4 days and it looks fine. That was a lot of things that i didn't know how to draw, so I freestyled it and it... doesn't look very good. First was the feets, I wanted to draw them with a horizontal perpective and didn't know how to do that, and secondly the bag , I should have used the Explorers of Sky bag as a reference, as it ended looking like a grocery bag :V.
Could have made a better job with the cloth a make it with folds, but I make it a little wobly and tried to shade folds on it... didn't work :V. About the drawings, Psyducks beak should be a little shorter and I feel like the circurference of the head should be revised to show that his head is inclined.
A goofy thing that I noticed just now is that the color that I picked for torchic's feet make it look like a humans feet, and I can't unsee it now.
Even with all the mistakes and the "not having any ideia what I'm doing" aspect, I do like doing this drawings way more than copying Pokemons (sketching was super fun too, I'm probably going to do that often). Not a surprise, but it's been more than a month since my last Pokemon drawing (but I still fell like I have to draw Decidueye, feels like a crime to draw so many Pokemons without drawing my favorite one yet).
These are the Pokemons I played with in PMD Blue Rescue Team and I named the team as "Team Wingspan", because both were birds and I wanted to make a team with only birds. What I failed to noticed is that both are WINGLESS birds and the 3rd member ended being a Magnemite. So yeah, interesting name... but not very accurate, Wingspan = 0m (I don't even play Wingspan very well too :T).
After making more complete, weak long, drawings I wanted to make simpler one for a while. I really like these sketches that people post, so I tried doing that with the main pokemons from Blue Rescue Team when I played, the chosen human Psyduck and his friend Torchic.
I had a lot of fun drawing them and tried a lot of different things, making different expressions, different styles, full body poses, references, jokes, and even a short comic.
The "disintegrating baby" was 100% an acident as was trying to draw him yawning, but when I started the left arm it looked too much like the meme, so I change to reference the meme :V
My favorite ones are be top right drawing from Psyduck, I liked him flipping off too, and from Torchic is him hanging upside down, the bottom left hug and the Jam reference (RYUUJIN).
I worked one day in each page, so two days I finished both, but I worked more than usual as I losed the notion of time while drawing both of them (so it could be considered to be around 3,5 days). Starting was always the problem, but after the first 2 drawings it's easier to keep the momentum and feels easier to draw the characters.
Ironically I was suffering with headaches when I was drawing Psyduck, and I remebered how much I hate having headaches. This makes even more ironic how Psyduck was chosen for me when I played Blue Rescue team, turning me into the Pokemon aflicted with chronic headaches would be a cruel divine punishment (I still want to draw a joke about that :V).
But, thinking about it, Psyduck is a perfect Pokemon for a protagonist with the "secretly overpowered" trope. With his "misterious psychic powers" that apear when the headache becomes too overwelming, and he doesn't remember using it.
I wanted to make a quick draw playing around with shadows so I made this drawing, it's from a story ideia I had a while ago and I wanted to draw the character with this pose holding the torch forward.
Took only 3 days to do this one, but maaaaaan I don't like it, hahahahaha. It was just a quick experiment so I avoided fixing the drawing and, as a result, it ended up looking pretty bad.
The most bothering part is the hand, man, I can't stop looking at that weird thumb, like the highlight in a drawing that calls your attention, but in this one it's because it looks awful. The face looks meh, the light in the face is technically wrong and the flame looks weird with the outline (the outlines were very poorly made too). The perspective is off too, as the torch looks gigantic (maybe if I worked with the handle to make the torch be inclined forward it would make more sense) and the arm doesn't sell very well the distance between his body and the torch.
Welp I hate it, was even a little embarrassed to post this one, but it was a fast one and is not like a lot of people are going to see this anyways :V
A different one once again, after finishing Usagi I was trying to decide what icon to change in my tumblr page. And then I remembered my favorite icon in "League of Legends"... yes I played a lot of LoL, main mid playing mostly with mages (favorite characters: Hwei, Lux, Zoe, Seraphine, Velkoz, Anivia, Karma, Ekko, Ezreal). Back to the drawing, I really liked the "Little Wolf" icon and never changed it since it came out (I never played Darius and hated to play against him), because cute doggy.
So I decided to draw that icon, and there was a huge issue. This icon is very detailed, wtf. No surprises their really, the work in the drawings from League of Legends are always great ... but how am I gonna draw this? I tried to reduce a little the details but I eventually accepted that I would have to simplify a lot this drawing.
Took me 5 days to finish, a lot of time (3 days) was spend coloring and shading (and figuring out how to do it). The result is fine, is very hard to compare with the original. Different from the Pokemon arts I usually draw this looks like a far cry from the original art. But I still like it.
I did have quite some work getting that smile right and had to redraw the muzzle some times as it was drew too long. I didn't even consider drawing the details in the colar, just making some simple shading on it.
I'm satisfied with the result, just wish it didn't took all that long. But what was I expecting from trying to draw based on a League of Legends art... even if it is just an icon. A very detailed icon.
It's been a long while since I last played League of Legends and I have no intension on going back. I stopped because of Vanguard the always on anti-cheat after I stayed 2 months without playing and noticed that shit was on all along, even after I disabled in startup from the Task Manager turns out that affected the tray icon. To disable it you have to manually use the tray icon and select to exit Vanguard, EVERYTIME YOU TURN ON YOU PC... after that I gave up on LoL for good. What lazy implementation is that? I'm giving no charity to Riot with one of their softwares running in the background, and if I don't want to, I have the extra work to close it manually every time? Fuck you Riot, give me an option to enable it once and I restart the PC to play your game, but as people accepted that shit like that (and a lot of people went out of their way to show the success of the anti-cheat without much pointing the problems) , they never changed. Good job guys.
For the same reason I didn't played 2XKO yet, maybe I try when I have a PS5 but I'm not installing anything from Riot if it uses Vanguard.
To be fair I also have my problem with League of Legends too, besides their invasive anti-cheat, and this can extend to every team based multiplayer game like Overwatch, Marvel Rivals and etc. I have more fun playing.. any other games, and this games aways drain so much time.
League was the worst as the matches take soooo long, and you could have a miserable match that was already over in the first 10 minutes (and of course your team will not surrender), so the next 25 minutes are not fun, you get nothing from that beside stress, a waste of time, and I just kept thinking what I could be doing instead of dealing with that. And other matches where just... boring, straight forward, I could do anything and we win. So why would I play such a game where I have 1 30 minute match of a interesting and exiting between every 5 other matches da range from boring to unbearable?
It got so bad that I just started to quit from games, over and over again, and well started to get penalized, making even more cynical with the game. After I stopped for some months I decided to try 1 match again for old times. Turns out it was one of the bad ones, and it felt like torture, turns out I lost the tolerance I had left for this. I quited that match and got penalized. It has been more than 1 year since that last match and I have intention of ever playing it again (can deny that I liked the Arena game mode, but I'm not download it with Vanguard working the way it does).
I liked the gameplay, dueling against your enemy and having those high stakes team fights, it was fun and exciting, but everything falls apart when you have those miserable matches where everything goes wrong, and you are just wanting for the lost and nothing you do matters in that match because you are too weak and the enemies are too strong. And the fault is mostly to the snowball, I personally really dislike the snowball in this games... why are you making me play all of this if the game can be over so soon? Of course, I understand the problem with my complain. As I'm saying how much I dislike the time each matches take to finish while complaining about snowball, the solution to speed up the matches. But I think it is a bad solution and this is a conceptual problem with this games (I'm not gonna get into it because this post is already getting excessively big), but to fix this would require to remake these games completely (and maybe remove what makes them enjoable for most people, snowball included), so snowball is not going anywhere and the only solution I have is to not play these games.
Even Deadlock, with it's amazing character, creative and fun mechanics have the same problem to me (played a little, liked it until those matches happened a couple if times, and I already grown sick of it). So I'm keeping fighting games as my PvP experience, they are fast, always intense and without the cursed snowball (at least, not to the level of Mobas). And hero shooters, I get bored of them very fast (also I suck with aiming) and it doesn't help that both are involved with shit companies that I don't want to give them my time or my money (Marvel and Blizzard).
After finishing āRabbit on The Moonā I turned my attention to the two authors of the comic, Songdog (story) and Nitteh (art) and decided to read other comics from them as I liked this one a lot. I was more inclined to start with a comic from Nitteh because I really liked the art from Rabbit on The Moon but she doesn't have a lot of finished comics, the opposite from Songdog. So I started with Songdogās comic āRepeatā (I canāt deny that the description of this comic was more alluring than the comic from Nitteh āLevel Xā, even if the art looked prettier and more interesting).
SPOILERS AHEAD. Recommend just reading the conclusion if you didnāt read the comic yet:
I didnāt know what to expect from the comic, the description was pretty vague but a story about ālocked in a reincarnation loopā has a lot of potential. I can say that the story was not what I expected, and I liked that as the story went in a completely different direction and surprising me.
The art is fine, I was very spoiled with the previous comics with great visuals like Rabbit on The Moon, Shinka and Milos From Home (that despite the simpler style still is very charming for me). It doesnāt have super detailed panels, with nice perspectives, or with beautiful uses of lights and shadows, but still does a great job with its visuals (honestly I didnāt read any comic until now that I didnāt like the art) being more than enough to tell the story and have pretty and cool moments. One thing that called my attention is that the characters arenāt shaded a lot of the time and I was surprised how that didnāt compromise the notion of perspective, so much that it took a while to notice that when I was reading. Sometimes when Iām drawing, before I shade, it seems like the drawing lacks depth, but I don't draw very well soā¦ that could be it :D (there are some simple dark and light tones in some scenes depending on the region, time of day or how illuminated it is, and they always look very pretty). Another thing that I noticed now is that the background vary greatly of colors in the comic (depending on time of day and region), sometimes the night is grey, sometimes is dark blue, and the day is green and sometimes is light blue, same for the color of the ground there is even a purple grass that reminded of Rabbit on The Moon :p.
The highlight of the comic is the story, due to the vague description I was expecting to witness the wolves living and dying in multiple cycles of reincarnation while trying toā¦ finish the cycle andā¦ dieā¦ forever? That doesn't sound right. But instead we accompany Sol (Sol means sun in Portuguese, so I immediately knew what he was about) and Tilter in their journey to finish the cycle, where Sol the sun and Lun the moon are bound to fight. One of them dies, reincarnates and they fight again and the cycle continues forever. And we start the story after Sol's failed attempt to finish the cycle as he tries to figure out what to do, and Tilter is a sick young wolf (that suffered the consequences from Solās attempt to end the cycle) that will serve as the connection required for Sol to avoid the cycle, creating sort of an older and younger brother dynamic between the two (funny thing, everyone is non-binary in the comic, and I didnāt noticed [I probably used he or she instead of them without noticing while reading]. Eventually, I started to notice how everyone is using neutral pronounsā¦and I didnāt think that it was because everyone was non-binary (maybe because they are gods? But wait Tilter is too. What 's going on?) until I read a comment from the author saying that. But that was enough to solidify their gender [and for almost every character :V] and this brother dynamic between the two. Death of the author I guess. The author says non-binary, I say Iām too dumb to notice and already gave everyone different genders :p).
The comic explored very well this conflict between the two gods, and how Sol is inclined to engage in this cycle and he needs somebody to anchor him away from that, talking about how a fog that conceals the world and everyone around him. There are even some scenes where Sol loses himself to it, getting excited to engage in the bloodshed of their conflict. Sol is a very well written character as he feels disconnected from others and even acts weird sometimes, in contrast there is Tilter to point this out and guide him. Another thing that I like about Sol is that he doesnāt know how to finish this cycle, he tried one time and it had very bad consequences to others, so much that he feels trapped and that he can only accept his destiny in this endless cycle.
I also liked Lun, the moon god and villain of the story. They are (was already starting with āheā :V, man I suck with gender neutralsā¦ you can interpret that as you wish) an evil entity with the only objective to continue the cycle while being completely indifferent from everything and everyone around them, using them as means to reach Sol or killing them if they dare interfere in their conflict. And it makes sense, Lun and Sol are immortal gods (oh yeah, they can only be killed by the other one) that will outlast everyone that is and will live in that world, making us think that Sol could have been like Lun sometime. I also liked the lore around these characters and how this conflict came to earth, among mortals, and the comic tells you little by little as the comic goes on.
One thing that felt weird in the beginning was the dialog fonts. I never thought something like this could feel off while reading comics. The reason is because Sol has a different font from everyone else (a serif font, something like a āTimes New Romanā), so youāre seeing the same font and suddenly a different one pops out when Sol is talking, and it stands out. But I actually really like this feature, because the only 2 characters with this is Lun and Sol, the 2 gods, and it also represents how they talk, with Sol having a more royal and refined font and Lun has a scribbled font with some extra scribbles sometimes (giving him the impression of a hoarse voice with menacing tone). Also this comic doesnāt have balloons for the dialog, with some ālazyā lines and colored letters to indicate the character that is talking. Again it felt weird in the beginning but it didnāt disturbed the reading in any way.
The characters are well developed, but most noticeably are the protagonists (Sol and Tilter) and Lun, as we stay most of the time with them. The other characters also have well defined and interesting personalities like Babble and Dawn that gives more variety then sad wolves.
The comic is very intense and pretty sad sometimes, as we witness the consequences of their conflict, with mortals being unwillingly thrown into this war. While Sol is suffering, blaming themselve (themselve or themselves? I donāt know) with what this conflict is causing and mourning everything he lost and is losing.
The comic is also pretty violent, to a level that sometimes it even gets goofy with the extreme violence. I'm a wolf in combat with another wolf, how will he counter attack? Bite and remove one of the eyes of the suckerā¦ somehow. There are 2 moments like this and they felt pretty goofy, but overall the violence makes more sense. This makes the comic pretty intense with the fights, raising the stakes of the story, because even if Sol is immortal the other characters arenāt. The stakes get very high in the final chapter resulting in a very intense final confrontation. In the beginning I was a little uncertain about Tilter, as he looked like the āannoying childā archetype, but it was not a problem as he was not irritatingly annoying and, to be fair he was āannoyingā, only in the beginning serving more of a lively character to contrast with the Solās melancholic personality (and brighten him up) .Ā
The ending felt a little bitā¦ messy? Nah, not really, mostly because they were trying to figure out how to ādefeatā Lun for a while (more like break the cycle) and their ideas were not very good and the plan fell apart pretty fast. But this āmessyā approach raised the stakes in the final chapter, their initial idea was not very good so Iāve kept wondering, what are they going to fight against Lun. But when everything was lost Sol found a way to ādefeatā Lun, and it was very smart and cleverly foreshadowed before.Ā
Conclusion: I liked it, the highlight for me in this comic is definitely the story. It feels really well constructed with clear themes in mind. I like how the author dealt with Sol, the main character, and how he behaves in the story showing how he is affected by the cycle and how he feels about the events that are happening in the story. The dynamic between Sol and Tilter had me worried in the beginning as the āannoying childā character was annoying for the reader sometimes, but I was wrong and itās pretty well done tying very well with themes around Sol.
How the comic tells the background of the characters and the events that happened is very good, as the reader is kept in the dark and learns as the stories progresses, so there is no long exposition explaining everything, and it was exciting to learn little by little about the world and even figuring some things out before the comic shows it.
I also like how the story managed to have high stakes even considering the condition of the main character and villain, and the stakes get very high in the final chapter and finishing with a satisfying ending.
The art is good, it feels a little less stylized then the previous comics I read and a little simpler (with less emphasis on shading and with different perspectives for the panels) but it works super well, as I drawed a lot in pixel art where shading is essential to give a tridimensional feel to the art I was surprised how well this comic still looks without it. That doesnāt mean this comic doesn't do anything interesting with the art, there still are some nice/interesting panels, character designs are nice (I really like Lunās design), there is a lot of variety in the coloring of the background based on the time of day and atmosphere and some creative artistic decisions in some elements of the comic. As an extra the comic is pretty violent, even to goofy levels sometimes, but it helps raise the stakes and with cool and intense confrontations.
Next is a different one, again. After finishing the previous drawing I was excited to draw something original again, but I was having a hard time deciding what to draw, especially because I uncertain if I would be able to draw that ideas. But I was not in the mood to draw Pokemons again. So I tried to think of something else that I would like to draw, and then I remember Jam's adorable rabbit companion, Usagi.
I immediately thought about him during Jam's taunt and decide to draw it. This was a little different because, despite being a redraw/copy, the original one is in game 3D, so the model is simplified and some details were hard to see, so I had some liberty in the drawing, adding more details as I saw fit.
This drawing took me 4 days to finish and it looks great. It took quite some work to get the body size, as I went up and down with the width of the chest, I also had to resize the folded legs a couple of times, but I definitely used a lot of time in the face. The face is the most important part of the drawing so I keep having to adjust them, position, size, everything, to try to get the right expression. Even after finishing it I still think it could be better.
I also added some things to the drawing, first one is the charm in the collar, because it was not very visible in the original one, so I used Jam's splash art as reference to draw it. The second one is the fur in the chest and neck, the original model have some but only the bigger ones close to the collar. So, to match the splash art and concept arts I added the fur in the chest and in the neck, and it really like how it looks.
For shading I went for the pure black shading for everything. It looked great in the previous drawing so I was inclined to used it again and makes a great contrast with the white fur.
I'm very happy I was able to do this drawing, I was super excited with Guilty Gear after the new patch and Jam's release and making a drawing out of it, based on my favorite taunt from her, is very fulfilling.
I've been playing GGST for 2 years and I really like this game. I love the style, I love the art (the lighting and animation techniques are so unique, it's absurd that they are the only game that use them, at least that I know), I really really like the musics, the rock references, the over the top designs and characters and the gameplay (but to be fair I haven't played a lot of different fighting games so I'm not very knowledgeable in gameplay sense).
From all of the characters I always thought Jam looked a little... normal, compared to the designs of the Guilty Gear cast. So when she was revealed as the new DLC I was a little disappointed. With initial expectations low my attitude completely changed when she was revealed, because of that dawn rabbit, Usagi. I always thought it was funny how in kung fu movies love to have a scene where the protagonist have to fight while holding something (especially Jackie Chan), and when I notice this was intention with that rabbit I immediately was interested and very curious how they would make her animations while carrying the adorable rabbit.
And it didn't disappoint, the animation (as always) are great, full of personality and, in her case, very goofy, with Usagi stealing the spotlight every time he can. With that in mind one of my favorites is definitely the taunt with that sassy Usagi smirk. Just as a final treat the story of Jam and Usagi is super goofy.
I'm always impressed how much effort the GGST team have just to add more personality to the characters. Usagi doesn't add anything to the gameplay, you could remove him and Jam would play the same. So his addition (that impacted in all her animations) is just to sell the fantasy of the character as a mighty kung-fu partner carrying her animal partner, as he is yanked around and holds for his life while she flies in the screen, so I can only appreciate all their commitment to sell the characters fantasy. But I shouldn't be surprised after everything they done with Delilah.
So this time I decided to do something very different and drew something original (my first OC ^^, and it's a furry :V).
In one of my game projects that I've been playing around (mostly to practice programming) I had this idea for this werewolf character and started to develop the story and themes around him. I went so far that I ended up really liking him (no other character I created has a story in this project, except this guy), especially because he matches so well the themes of the game.
I've been working in the sprites for the characters of the game and, besides the initial character, he got the most sprites and I passed a lot of time working on them (playing around with making exaggerated poses is pretty fun).
I've always pictured the "splash art" for this character making that pose (holding and stretching the tie with his other hand in the pocket) and it got stuck in my head for a long time. So after finishing my previous drawing i thought to myself "I could try and draw him, no compromise, I try this first day and don't need to keep working on it if I'm not confident", so in the first day I got a pretty decent first draft and decided to finish it.
It took me around 4 days to finish it, but I putted a lot of time into it than usual (I think i spent 1:30 hours straight without noticing, I was pretty excited with this drawing), and the result?
I really liked it, I completely lost myself while working on the shadows but it was worth it, this is my favorite thing on the drawing. Funny how the body, that was quite fast for me to draw, its the best part of the drawing. I'm very happy with how the body looks and that I managed to get this pose right (with zero experience, i never drew human bodies and poses before).
The problem was the head, I had to redraw and tweak it a lot of times even after making the final lineart, because I couldn't get the perspective right. The first draft was very goofy as the muzzle was pointing to a different direction from the head itself. Sadly the head still bother's me a little, the proportions feel wrong (the muzzle is huge and I'm not sure if the yellow eye is in the correct position) and I had no idea how to translate the anatomy of a wolf head into the drawing properly.
I'm happy the effect from the shadow in the face are working well, giving him two different expressions when the grin and red eye is present, but I can't stop having the impression that the head feels a little off.
It's funny how I dived so deep with what was initially a joke character. There is already a werewolf character and he is more monster like (and the curse will not be beneficial in the game), so I was thinking about how funny it would be to have another werewolf character with the fancy suit (because I also wanted to have a "beneficial transformation character"), and instead of fighting in the werewolf form he would have other people doing things for him (like the playboy son of the owner of the company, that "somehow" receives a high specialized position, but, different from the other workers on that position, receives a prestigious treatment in the company. In this case he got the same "werewolf position" in the company but without the problems of the curse).
Now I turned him into the (evil) shareholders of the (evil) company, with a "wolf in sheep's clothing" theme. But I still like the "nepo baby"/"son of the boss" character and will probably revisit this idea in the future (will probably end up with multiple flavors of werewolf in the game) (I can't deny a nepo baby furry is great a joke by itself).
Moral of the story, never completely disregard silly/joke ideas, something way more interesting can come out from them.
I was waiting to read the other comics from ComicFury, besides the PMD related ones, and also focus a little more on finished comics to slow down the ever growing pending comics to follow. So I started reading a short yet very beautiful one, āRabbit on The Moonā. I had my eyes in this comic for a while because it looked very beautiful, and I was not disappointed.
SPOILERS AHEAD. Recommend just reading the conclusion if you didnāt read the comic yet:
I chose this one because I thought some panels were very pretty and the comic didnāt disappoint. The comic is very pretty and I really liked some panels, the background, the lighting, the colors, it's all very pretty. Looking at some of the art now, some panels, more dramatic ones have the shadows more accentuated, backgrounds are more colorful and even the color of the characters change to match the color of the panel (especially the main character, that has white fur). Sadly Iām not (even close to) very knowledgeable in art so I just think it is pretty and now,Ā months later, Iām trying to figure out what makes those panels so pretty. But the main point about this comic that I kept in mind is that it is very pretty and very sad.Ā
Also this comic loves pink backgrounds, never thought it would look so pretty, these panels must be my favorite ones. Man I canāt stop noticing more things kkkkkkkkkk, itās crazy how colors of the grass changes during the story, blue, purple, yellowish green, very saturated green. Sometimes it matches the hue of the sky, sometimes itās a completely different color, sometimes itās a gradient as the color gently changes as you approach the ground. AH BEAUTIFUL I LOVE IT, Iāll have to read it again eventually.
I didnāt notice so much back then, but now, after reading a lot more comics (especially the ones with animal characters [what? I like animal characters, honestly it sounds way easier to have people liking a character, make them cute or cool with animals. We have significant preconceived notions about each animal and that helps to show who they are with their visuals and creates opportunities to mislead the reader. Also, variety, you only have so much you can do with a human character before it looks cartoonish {furries donāt count, they are the closest to using this āanimal factorā with human characters}, but animals have so many body formats, colors and behavior. As always nature being the favorite source of inspiration for humans. Thinking about it makes me appreciate more how challenging and creative people have to be to design human characters.])... wow, resumingā¦Ā after reading a lot more comics I noticed how the main characters in this comic all have very different designs, despite my rant above about the variety with animal character visuals, they are usually pretty similar, just with fur color and patterns being the most noticeable feature to distinguish them. Itās not a big deal honestly (and the fur color/pattern is enough), but feels fair to appreciate when a comic manages to have such variety in the visual of their rabbits.
Also I canāt imagine all the work to draw those skeletons, shit I canāt imagine myself drawing a single one with so much detail, so the dozens in some of the pages is very impressive.
Focusing on the story, is very good. It is quite a simple story, because the comic is pretty short. The persona of death, who guides the souls to the afterlife and hears their stories, inspired by their stories, decides to visit earth to experience both life and death as an adorable Jackalope (great and solid setup for the story, laying out very soon what the story is about). And whelpā¦ as expected, the comic is pretty sad. Itās pretty interesting that all 3 comics with rabbits are very sad and grief is a very important theme in the story, maybe because they donāt live much in the wilds, so they make a great personas for the briefness and fragility of life (but that doesnāt justify the grief theme). Funny how bunnies arenāt humans main source of meat considering how they are the main prey for a lot of animals in the wild and they reproduce very quickly (Maybe cuteness is a good counter against humans after all? Doubt it, there must be some practical reasons like their societal structures, fat/nutritional value or because of their speed and agility).
But yeah, itās sad. Death (Iām going to call her this, because I donāt remember how sheās called) meets a group of rabbits, each one with a disability that compromises their survival. The comic does a good job setting up the themes in the story (and how sad it will be) with the intermissions where we see each rabbit after they die, making us imagine how Death is going to deal with all this, and her state at the end of her journey.Ā
I really like Deathās development (itās the main focus of this story), she starts very naive. Very soon she discovers where the souls (that she calls travelers) come from. Because of her unique perspective, she initially sees only the beauty in death with indifference to the sadness that it brings. This makes a great contrast with Sage, a rabbit she gets very close to and eventually forms a romantic relationship that struggles as her friends are dying. As Death draws closer to Sage she start to understand a little about Sage's feelings, but her lively and optimistic personality persists (another great contrast with Sage's more melancholic personality), untillā¦ wellā¦ we knew this was coming, Sage dies and Death truly understands grief.Ā
So yeah, it's sad. The crack in Deathās lively personality when that happens is heart breaking. But despite this sorrowful climax the story has a happy (and emotional) ending (another rabbit comic feature, they all have happy [and emotional] endings, as expected from stories about death and grief).
Conclusion: I like it, a lot. I have only praises for the visual of the comic, colorful, with some great panels, varied character designs and very very beautiful. Canāt imagine all the work that had to be put into some of the pages. I was impressed when I read for the first time and still impressed now that Iām seeing them again.Ā
The comic is pretty short, so the story is simple and straight forward. No mysteries or misdirections, from the start the comic is very clear what the story is about and, with some clever foreshadowings, prepares the reader for what's coming later. Personally, that's not a bad thing, the authors were focused on telling their story and did a great job (itās more impressive to tell a story in 10 pages than in 100). With that in mind, the story is sad and they did a great job making me sad while reading :V
Canāt praise this comic more.
Let's stay in the easy ones, I wanted to draw Corviknight but it looked to hard so I decided to start with Corvisquire.
Took me 4 days to finish it, 3 as usual plus one to color it and it looks fine. I had quite some difficulty to get the "torso" right and the head was too small, so I had to tweak it multiple times. A made the wings to big but I decided to let them like that, I prefer like this and I didn't want to redraw it all over again.
Honestly I pretty much drew this bird twice as the first draft had a lot of problems and I kept trying to fix them and some parts like the body and head never looked right.
To avoid taking much more time to finish I decided to not make the final line art and play with the wet paint brush instead. I intentionally let it look a little rough with the drawing getting out of the outlines and with few strokes. I liked how it looks, just the shading with the black brush didn't pleased me, maybe I should had used a hue shifted color instead. I also posted the draft here with a simple pencil to highlight the darker areas in the drawing.
Can't stop thinking that my drawings are getting worse :T
It feels like I'm making more mistakes then before. Sadly I am drawing way less and the drawings are also taking more to finish. And I still didn't managed to draw everyday again like before :(
Weirdly enough my drawings are also getting less likes, even if they look better then before. Never cared about this (still don't), but it's interesting that this is happening (maybe an artist that care about this could be discouraged and it could negatively affect how they approach their art. Aaaaaaah social media, a blessing and a curse for artist... maybe mostly a curse now thanks to AI... fuck AI), a good reason could be because I'm drawing less popular Pokemons.
While I was reading Yet Another PMD Comic, I told my friends of this new hobby (knowing that some of them read manga and webcomics. I still think it is very ironic that despite them saying that I should read them, I started reading randomly by myself starting with some obscure comics based on obscure Pokemon spinoff games). So, as expected they recommended some other comics to read and one of them was āAfter Darkā.
My friend that recommended really liked this comic (when we were at college he painted his hair green, just like the main character does in the comic. So I do wonder if he was inspired to do so because of the comic), maybe even more than how much I like āMilos From Homeā. Then I started reading andā¦ I had an issueā¦ I didnāt like the comic.
SPOILERS AHEAD. Recommend just reading the conclusion if you didnāt read the comic yet:
Obviously I didnāt tell him I don't like the comic, and even if I do, I wonāt be honest of how much I donāt like it. IRONICALLY, another one of my friends (who reads a lot of mangas) read āMilos From Homeā and told me he stopped in the middle because he was bored, mostly because the story didnāt have a main hook and the characters were not pursuing anything yet and that makes sense (he also told me the characters didnāt have personalitiesā¦ and I didnāt know what to say in relation to that. That felt SO WRONG, the characters are great and their personalities are very well defined. I think his mind is poisoned with comically exaggerated personalities from Western comics/mangas and if the character doesn't act in a exaggerated fashion he thinks they lack one... I need to read a comic he liked and say it was bad for him because their personalities were too exaggerated and "anime" like š¹āæš¹).
Anyway, itās a werewolf story. I like werewolves, they are cool. The main character was bitten by a werewolf and ran away from home before he transformed for the first time. The comic has two seasons and I read both, sadly the comic was canceled in webtoons, I didnāt search for the authors so I don't know if he is continuing the comic elsewhere.
First a good thing about the comic is the art, the comic is very pretty. I always felt the comic looked pretty colorful, even if the colors are usually darker. The style reminds me of some rougher sketches especially in the first season, similar to Milos From Home but not as extreme. The werewolf designs areā¦ fine, I like the more monstrous designs, the designs feel close to the furry category for me (human with fur and animal face). I wouldnāt call them furry straight up (I actually donāt know why, I suspect itās because the style is very cartoonish, I think I have a bias to furry characters looking more cartoonish) and I didnāt dislike them. At the same time I would say that the werewolf designs make sense and felt less fantastical.
So with that out of the way, here comes the bad. The comic is boringā¦ is very boring and slow (again, ironic, now this friend that likes After Dark needs to read the favorite comic from my other friend and say itās boring, so the cycle can be completed). I read all the comics and it was fine in the beginning, but I started to get bothered pretty soon and gradually got less and less excited to read. I was reading āShinkaā at the same time and I was way more excited for this one. In the second season I was more cynical about it and started to read pretty fast and even skip some parts of the comic, I do believe the second season was worse. So much so that I stopped reading for a while and just kept reading Shinka because I was a lot more excited with it.
Why is it so boring? Start with him transforming into a werewolf for the first time, and it took forever (itās actually bizarre that itās not so much episodes but it felt like forever) the idea was to have him (slowly) transforming while showing us the events the led to him being bitten, the death of his girlfriend and the fact that he was an asshole. But.. thatās not good, I donāt like it. And the switches felt too frequent, completely gutting any sense of pacing for the story. I also felt like I understood what his backstory was about halfway of all that (to be fair my friend told me that he was an asshole, but I think that is established pretty soon) so everytime we were in the backstory or him talking to his dead girlfriend I was like āCome oooooooooon, I got it, transform already, I want to see what happensā. After he finally transforms, shit happens and then things getā¦ soooooo worse.Ā
The next part is more of a slice of life story, where he manages to get a place to live, a job, meets some people, etc. And that was so boring. I want to know more about the curse, werewolves, and not spend so much time with his job and coworkers. Yes, slice of life is not my type, but in my defence the comic was talking a very different tune in the first part so all of that felt like the story was stalling. The first part didnāt have much of a pacing or things to look after in the story, so I was expecting something more in the second part.Ā
Also, this is not a complaint as this felt intentional by the author, but my god dude, how can you be such a dumbass. He took so long to figure out he was a werewolf, to be fair he forgot his transformation, but it is not clear how much he remembers but I expected the eating a pigeon or his canines would be enough.Ā
After all the boring part he finally transforms a second time andā¦ the comic switches focus, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? And focus on his coworker and her family. WTF, I WAS WAITING FOR SOMETHING INTERESTING TO HAPPEN AND YOU PULL THIS ONE? I was not happy with that and, for the first time I jumped pages until the comic returns to him again. I get it she is his love interest, but Iām not interested in her enough compared to all the werewolf stuff. It reminded me of the first part of the comic, interrupting the story to get into something else less interesting, and staying there for too long.
Then the third part starts and we finally have some progress about the werewolf stuff, with a group of werewolves that he meets. The problem is that there was no tension or doubt about those guys, just the main character being a jerk and insecure, so it didnāt create the expectation for some interesting conflict between the main character and the group. They just looked like good guys. But it was also too soon to judge that, maybe something will happen or some hint about these guys will come upā¦ then the comic endedā¦ god damnit. The series was cancelled on Webtoons, the author mentioned he might continue the series somewhere else, but nothing came up until now, that Iām aware of.
Conclusion: Soooooooooooooooo yeah, I didnāt like the comic (itās the first comic that I didnāt likeā¦ hurray?). I donāt have any complaints about the art, I like how the comic looks. Itās not my preferred werewolf design, but it doesnāt affect my view of the comic in any way. My problem is not the story by itself, it has some interesting things, but how the story is told. The constant cuts and switches from scenes are not very well executed and completely ruins the flow of the comic and I felt like sometimes there was nothing very interesting happening, so I started to get bored. I will say that the comic doesnāt help itself, it starts dark, (a little) gory and mysterious but in the middle is becomes a slice of life, I donāt know if this was the initial intention of the author, a switch of direction or this was just a one thing in the comic, but if you are into a dark werewolf story all that slice of life part feels very uninteresting (I'll transform into a monster and kill everyone around me... now let's see the mundane problems from the coworker that I have a crush on :D).Ā
Of course, thatās just me, because clearly a lot of people liked this comic. Appreciation of art is very subjective and that's nothing wrong with that. Few things in the world can have two people experiencing the same thing, but having completely different sentiments about it and itās interesting to see this happening between me and my friends (with After Dark and Milos From Home).Ā That is one of the beauties of comic/movies/books/video games, even if the age of internet ruined it, as we can average peoples opinions or drown ourselves in our echo chamber and completely forget this important aspect of art.
Does it mean I will tell my friend that I didnāt like the comic, so we can discuss and reflect about our different perspectives about it? HELL NO, Iāll take this to my grave!!!
After the failure that was Gabumon I managed to get better results in the next one, Talonflame. This birds stayed a while in my pending drawings and as it looked easier I decided to finally make this drawing.
It took me 5 days (oof) and I did have a more work than expected in this one. Took quite some time shading too as I tried different things with this drawing.
In the first day I focused mostly in making a quick draft before starting to go into the details, still managed to get the head bigger, I decided to keep it that way as it doesn't look so off. I was having a hard time with the wings so I decided to not focus in getting them right. Sadly a lot of things are different compared to the original still, but nothing very absurd but bothers me a little (body should be wider, face should be smaller, left feet is off and the wings).
Tried playing with pure white for the highlights in the shading and I liked how it looks, I was playing to make only the highlights but the drawing felt off without the shadows, so I used just black for shading in two layers and changed the opacity on one of them.
So yeah, took quite some time (I'm still not managing to draw everyday like before :(, the other project I'm working on my free time is, sadly, responsible for that). I'm considering not making the final line art for every drawing as they take 1 to 2 more days to finish. Let's see how everything goes in the next ones.
