OTG Artblog

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Plume Triton

Plume Triton evolves into Professor Plumage at level 20.

You know, if it’s getting this hard to do one every day, I might as well just slow down.

Anyway, here’s a simple one. Professor Plumage is just an ibis with Professor Layton’s hat and personality, so his prevo is a pigeon with Luke’s hat and personality. Both names are kinda a stretch, and I’m not actually a Layton fan so I just used what few character names I knew for the bio.

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Onabear

holyyyyyyy shit drawing a bear was hard

Anyway this is the piece that took so long, mostly because I didn’t wanna do it after I realized what it would take but I already committed to it so here it is.

This is another one who’s a member of an actual yōkai species. She is an aka-shaguma, a relative of the zashiki-warashi known for its red hair and less controllable nature, from what I can find. It’s written as 赤シャグマ if you wanna look it up, since it doesn’t have an English Wikipedia page.

Aka-shaguma are named after this headgear called the shaguma (赤熊) which means red bear, so I included a literal red bear here, since I needed to replace the animal with something.

This is actually the first fankai I made since I came back to Yo-kai Watch a few years ago. I did a bunch in middle school but most were Classic Yo-Kai because they’re easy since you just draw a real yōkai from folklore. Given that fact, and how this took so much effort, it’s my Heartful mascot.

Beartaker

yeah so I had to draw two bears and one was wearing a saddle do you know how hard it is to draw a bear saddle

Beartaker evolves from Onabear when fused with a Riding Wand.

The original Onabear (On a bear + unaware), called Caredevil (careless + daredevil) had some weird chitinous mutt instead of the bear. Maybe I’ll show that someday. I used the chitinous plating as armor here!

The Japanese name is a bit of a stretch, unfortunately. It’s sewa (assistance) + aka-shaguma, since I can’t perfectly luck into everything. Oroka-shaguma (meaning foolish shaguma) was pretty good luck.

I actually drew the bear and the rider separately and put them together for this! It probably would have been even more of a pain if I hadn’t done this. It also allowed for certain fun opportunities.

Thingleader

One fun thing about making the bear a separate drawing is that I can recolor one but not the other. The bear will probably be recolored into a Yo-criminal, because you guys deserve to see it in full.

This was originally designed as the Heartful Crank Rare, but I had a better idea for that, so she’s just a normal S-Rank Rare instead since I didn’t want to waste this.

I am fairly proud of the name. It just means “Ultra-grade group leader” or “Ultra-grade ringleader” but it has that nice forwards-to-backwards thing going on.

Sorry if this post seems way too long.

i am so tired

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Okay so that art piece is still kicking my butt and I’ve been wanting to post some content from other series so here’s a really good picture of Paper Mario I drew a year or so ago, with Fire Mario color variant.

I don’t often mess around with other brush styles, so that was fun, and I really like how I used actual paper to give him that paper feeling. The Lineland Road stuff isn’t mine, obviously. It came from a site called Wallpaper Cave which seemed fishy but I didn’t download from them directly so it’s safe.

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X-sponge

Okay I finally got my 2DS working and someone’s old game collection, and I’ve been so focused on that I completely forgot I started drawing this guy and only now finished it.

X-sponge: I’ll give you my medal, if you can beat me in a b*ttle!

This is a Yo-kai concept that really takes advantage of me setting my stuff in the current year. Here’s a modern Yo-kai for a modern problem, that being the whole “I can’t say that on Tumblr, or Reddit, or real life! I’d get banned on TikTok!” phenomenon. He’s responsible for the strange argots people use so they aren’t immediately stamped out by the watchful eyes of the automatic moderation.

I originally designed this as “Ahhterisk” and he was going to be an asterisk shaped relative of Runsure, but it turns out ahh as ass is just AAVE and not actually self censorship. So I removed the center prongs and made him an X for the “expunge” pun.

I also took the opportunity to make him a stamp now that he was an X because spongy stamps are a thing if I recall correctly and now he can stamp an X things. Also the program I use has paint brushes with the texture of real paint and I wanted to try it for once.

The eye was originally intended as his eye, but I thought it would be funnier if it watching him, making sure he never gets a moment of peace to be not sqeaky clean. Which is ironic, because he’s a stamp.

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Mount Rushdown

Mount Rushdown evolves from Mad Mountain when fused with Starry Spangles.

Okay so I’ve been on hiatus because I’ve got something I’ve been wanting to show, but it’s taking a while. So instead of waiting on this I’ve gotten another fun one from the bank.

I want to play around with as many Yo-kai Watch gimmicks as possible, so here’s one take for a Merican counterpart. I decided on Mad Mountain because he appears a lot in the background of scenes, but never actually got an episode of his own, probably due to a lack of a proper Inspirit. So he’s significant enough to always be around, even though he’s never in focus.

In the original Japanese, Mad Mountain and Lava Lord are meant to be specific mountains, just given form. Mad Mountain is Mt. Fuji, which you could probably tell, while Lava Lord is Sakurajima, a volcano in Kyushu. So when making a third, American member, I had to make him a specific famous mountain. And considering these guys are mountains with faces, I had to pick the famous American mountain with faces.

The further puns, like being named “Mount Rushdown” or being a “face wrestler” sealed the deal. Dropping Peak isn’t based on any wrestling thing, it’s a reference to the rave reviews my guys get on the Yo-kai Craft server.

One fun thing about my work that you can see a bit of now is that Japanese humans and places use their Japanese names, while American humans and names use their dub names. This is also why Mount Rushdown has a pun name while the other two’s Japanese names are just the names of their mountains. He’s Merican, and working on dub rules!

I’m a bit trepidatious of using Mount Rushmore because of how controversial the mountain is in real life.

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Sclicitor

I have had it up to here with posts about the Yo-kai Watch petition, so I conceptualized, drew, and finished this Yo-kai in about a day with pure spite as my motivator.

It feels like no one knows everyone else knows about the petition so people keep making new posts that are just “here’s a link to the petition, sign it”. Useless fandom petitions are not new, it’s just that people are flocking to this one in response to the big crackdown on the Yo-kai Watch 2 for Phone and Switch fan remake. By the way, it doesn’t seem like more transformative work such as mods or even fan translations are being shot down, so I don’t think there’s much to worry about.

As for Sclicitor itself, the Japanese pun here is that “sēgan” can be written as 請願 (petition) or as 正眼, which can mean “welcoming eyes” or “aim for the optics”. So we have a petitioner who’s freindly but has a laser focus on your weak spots. The English name is also something I’m proud of. Change one letter in “solicitor” and you get a pun on the sclera, which is the white of the eye.

I was extra careful to make sure that actual good petitions are outside of the Sclicitors’s jurisdiction and their abilities are only used on useless petitions so that I don’t sound like I hate the concept of petitioning, just those useless petitions that don’t actually have a game plan except for getting a bunch of people together.

It’s also one my guys who is an existing yōkai species! They’re examples of the famous shirime, the Yo-kai with a eye in it’s butt! This is kinda just because it’s the only thing that would come up for “eyeball yōkai”, partially because it’s an iconic yōkai not in Yo-kai Watch, and partially because it makes this joke even funnier. I managed to do the shirime tastefully buy just turning the whole thing upside down by default so the eye became a head and the head became a tail. The red epaulets are supposed to look like blood, to give the whole “go for the optics” vibe.

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Psckaorepeyaoughn and Arachive

Here’s the “sharing a post” post, featuring my first S-Rank, and my first Crank Rare.

Psckaorepeyaoughn, who’s name I have to copy and paste every time I want to say it, is a spirit of the uncanny valley, a phenomenon that was discovered in Japan. The world translated as uncanny there, “bukimi”, happens to be the same word that was translated as Eerie in Yo-kai Watch.

As for that name, I actually made the design and power before the name, before I realized that I could just make the name as hard to look at as the guy. I had particular fun with the Japanese name which uses katakana, hiragana, kanji, romaji, and numbers to literally just spell out the Japanese word for scorpion. As for the English name, I went ham on finding as many ways to make normal sounds with odd combos of letters. I probably could’ve found weird letters too but I don’t think any fit.

Arachive is simple. I wanted to mess with the patters so it could still technically be a recolor but look more different, so I replaced the painted on face with a giant eyeball, and he’s sepia-toned so he looks like he’s of the past. I’ve noticed I get more notes when I explain the Japanese pun, so I’m gonna do that here too. Arachive’s name is a lot simpler than Psckaorepeyaoughn despite actually being a pun. Tamekomu means “stockpiling” so flip the vowels and you’ve got an arachnid pun.

And remember, every time you have trouble drawing, there’s a giant scorpion behind you.

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Conk-reet

Okay so I have a few plans for how to handle Yo-kai families, so tomorrow we’re doing an event where I see how each plan looks.

One: Each member gets their own post, added onto the earliest member via reblog.

Two: Each member gets a section on the same post to themselves.

Three: They share a post completely.

I’ll do one for each and see how it goes.

As for Conk-reet herself, she originally began as a big lizardy creature, but I was looking through my notes and realized I didn’t have many women Yo-kai, and Tough famously has no women, so this Tough guy I was having trouble designing could just be a woman instead. I made her a specific type of punk called a bōsōzoku, which I planned to mention on the card but I ran out of space and didn’t want to exclude how many times she front-flipped before dying. This is just for the road theming.

Her being a woman also adds to the pun. Originally, it was just “anaboko” (pothole) and “bokoru” (beat up), but her being a girl means can add Ana, a girl’s name, to this mix. I tried to find the most common kanji used to spell the name in order to make the pun more obvious.

There is one thing, though. Her being a Tough girl means she has a lot in common with Mana, my Watcher. Fuck, her name is even Ana! So instead of wasting all this effort and having to redesign her, I’ve decided that’s her bit now. That’s her gag. She’s a funhouse mirror of Mana with all her annoying traits and none of her nice ones.

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Innosus

Innosus evolves into Negasus when fused with Shirokuma.

Here’s another easy one since I missed a day. A more interesting one will be coming later today if I can manage it.

Innosus came about when I wanted to do a Yo-kai who makes you do bad things without knowing. It was gonna be an original creation, but I realized that a Negasus prevo would be better suited for it. Also, adding prevos almost never happens in Yo-kai Watch so it’s novel.

Construction, wise, this is just a baby Negasus. I do with I made him more awkward like a real colt, but it’s not like Negasus has long limbs anyway. I almost gave him the Japanese name Ubuma, but that implies a Neighfarious prevo instead of a Negasus one. His Soultimate is Innosus shock, which is a reference to the early name of Negasus’s Soultimate, because he’d be shocked more often than he’d be cursing.

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Raiz

Raiz evolves from Daiz when fused with Firewig.

My first evolution of an existing Yo-kai!

I don’t know how accurate this is to Daiz’s character because he’s supposed to just be a mild-mannered ham factory worker who’s only driven mad by a sausage factory, but anyone can fall into bad habits, and I don’t think anyone cares about Daiz’s backstory actually.

This is kinda just an expansion on his existing rage mode, but I did do something fun with it. His Japanese name is the same as Daiz’s, that being Bōbō, but I spelled this one with the kanji for violence (暴) instead of katakana. This is because obviously they don’t change Daiz’s name when he goes into rage mode, so I can joke that my guy totally appeared in the show! They said his name out loud, you don’t know how they spelled it!

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Lobstir

So, here’s the first Merican Yo-kai of the blog. Making Merican Yo-kai is a fun trade-off for me. I lose my precious Shikoku theming and the ability to look into actual yōkai legends for inspiration, but I gain a really big boon.

I don’t have to do research for everything!

Normally, in order to be authentic, I look up a Japanese pun regarding the Inspirit effect I want, which is fun but can be frustrating when the peices don’t fit into anything that would make a good design. But I don’t worry about doing that for the Merican Yo-kai because they’re supposed to be natural English speakers and can just be English puns.

While the Merican Yo-kai in the actual series are actually calques between English and Japanese, I don’t really like that. When I make Merican Yo-kai, I decide to do something a bit unorthodox. I try and aim for something like what the dub team would come up with if they could make their own Yo-kai, because I think that’s a very funny way to make “authentic” Merican Yo-kai. Merican Yo-kai that feel like they came from Merican Yo-kai Watch.

I feel like a good idea for anyone reading this who wants to make their own fankai is to start by making Merican Yo-kai. Even if you decide to do it the standard way, with the calques, they don’t really take much thought. Just find some words that pun well and would be funny as a character design and put them together. Also, stereotypes about Americans are always funny, but you don’t even have to use them if you don’t want to.

As for Lobstir himself, a friend actually came up with the concept, and let me use it. I actually didn’t have him marked as Merican at first and only retroactively did once I started getting the hang of Fankai making. I feel like Lobstir would be one of those guys who uses recycled animation every time he Inspirits someone.

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Housleaper

This guy was actually made for a contest for the Minecraft mod Yo-kai Craft. I got 2nd place, but I don’t feel robbed because the 1st place guy could produce light and that’s pretty valuable in Minecraft. I also checked with Mvoob, the creator of the mod, to make sure that I was allowed to post about this.

I actually kinda went overboard with the details on this guy. I wanted one of those kanji puns like what Poofessor had because I hadn’t done that before, and wanted my submission to seem super authentic so he didn’t look out of place when every other Yo-kai is official. I landed on “Kaerusui” which could be written “換留守居” (kae rusui, substitute housekeeper) or “蛙睡” (kaeru sui, frog sleep), but I wrote it in katakana to keep it ambiguous. I knew I had to have it once I put together that the pun worked in English too, pulling together “housekeeper”, “sleeper”, and “leaper”.

I also wanted to make a guy you would want to have around in your Minecraft house, which is why I decided on a housekeeper theme at all. The idea is that he functions like your personal Elder Guardian and gives everyone else Mining Fatigue so they can’t bust down your walls or ruin your garden.

I then proceeded to go ham on the research. I researched the historical rusui-ban of the Edo period to see what they wore. (They’re also a lot more than just housekeepers.) I researched the skin patterns of Bufo japonicus in order to maker sure he looked like an accurate kind of toad. I even researched what traditional Japanese sleepwear can be so I could have him visibly but subtly wear his sleep clothes under his work clothes. I did basically everything short of just going to a library and asking to see their books about toads and the Edo period.

So what I’m saying is don’t know if it was enough.

He’s also a member of a real Yo-kai species, the yadomori. Yadomori means “house protector”, but they’re kinda just frog ghosts (Cricky is one) who haunt bedrooms. The house protection part comes from what it’s said that living frogs do in, of course, Shikoku, because I still wanted to use this guy myself so he has to fit the theme too. They protect houses they live under from earthquakes by holding the posts down. So, for added accuracy, you can dig a hole under your Minecraft house and plop Housleaper down there so you can have his power but still have all the floor space you want. It’s where he belongs.

I kinda wanted the pun I made to be crazier and less “just the real yōkai” but I think the sleepiness allows him to be his own character. I completely lucked in on this one too, I was just looking for things that punned with rusui and happened to land on frogs.

Given how much effort went into this guy, and how much exposure he’s gonna get, he has to be my Slippery mascot. I’m attached to him now.

I am SO sorry to the Yo-kai Craft devs who have to model this guy now.

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Quickgnaw

fun fact: the nailbed can also be called the quick!

Yo-kai Watch is known for its gross-out guys, so here’s my crack at it. Sorry if I overdid, but I did try to get people’s reads on this before posting it here and other Yo-kai Watch fans liked it.

It’s based on the akateko, which in folklore is just a hand that hangs from trees, so it would suck as a battle monster. This is why I chose to do a play on it rather than just use the actual yōkai. I’m surprised that there’s never been a nail-biting Yo-kai in the series before.

There are Shikoku-origin stories about the akateko so it kind of fits the theme. None from Ehime but, hey, they could travel.

I’d say that this is gonna be my Eerie mascot. (Basabi is the Mysterious one, Jikkuri is the Brave one, if you’re wondering.) It’s probably one of the Most Eerie designs I’ve got. I also think you could get some good visual gags of it being hand-sized and being drawn in crowd scenes as if it was the hand of a larger invisible guy.

Also, I did not know Migi from Parasyte was a thing until I showed Quickgnaw to a friend to freak her out.

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Snugbug

One thing Yo-kai Watch does that I love is when it does a literal version of a turn of phrase meant to describe someone. Carniboy, Herbiboy, Ray O’ Light and kinda Drizzelda are all examples of this, and so I wanted to make my own. A kotatsumushi is someone who sleeps under the kotatsu all winter, so I made a literal bug that is under, or may be, a kotatsu.

The oranges atop him are a traditional thing when it comes to kotatsu, but also they fit into the setting I’ve chosen because of how important oranges are to Ehime. Don’t expect everyone I make to have a connection to the setting but I’ll point it out when it’s relevant.

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Tanuki Suit

I actually don’t mind that Yo-kai Watch never really did much with tanuki. It’s good to have the lesser guys get a chance for a change. However, I happened to land my story right where TANUKI ROYALTY lives so I gotta do some tanuki stuff.

Most actual tanuki from folktales are just “(gimmick)-danuki” and I’ll probably pump out a few of those as Classic Yo-kai if I feel like it, but wanted to do one who was a Modern Yo-kai with a modern gimmick. I landed on “public relations” because of how cute tanuki are portrayed, and then realized I could do a nice Mario 3 pun as well. It’s Tanuki Suit, like the suit Mario wears, but also “suit worn by a tanuki”, “corpo suit who is a tanuki” and of course “tanuki lawsuit”.

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Here’s the rest of my stuff from Yo-tober. I didn’t manage to complete it, but I did manage to get to the part I wanted, and do a fankai.

Jikkuri

The pun with Jikkuri is that jikkuri means careful, and kuri means chestnut. Also there’s the igabo, who is a chestnut headed yōkai from actual myth.

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Soseki Nyatsume

So, how bout that AI Puni event?

I had actually already done “What if they did a Jibanyan variant based on Soseki Natsume a while ago for Yo-tober over on Reddit. I actually had no plans to ever do a nyan variant at all but they forced my hand. Other ideas I had included Magnyatic (the Japanese word for magnetic field is jiba, and I feel like it’d be funny to bring up that everything has magnetism, not just metal) and Nyan Man, a crossover Yo-kai who’s a Jibanyan themed Robot Master.

Months after that and a few days prior to this, I watched the Level-5 Vision and they had their own take on Soseki! I was distraught because Level-5 had done this idea as a way bigger scale than I ever could, but everywhere I mentioned it, no one really cared about that because the trailer was AI and so implicitly liked my guy more. It was kinda a reverse monkey’s paw for me.

I’d like to think my idea is also better, because mine is “how would this actual historical figure be warped in the afterlife” and theirs is “what if Soseki’s cat book was based on a cat he had but it was a actually a Yo-kai cat *burp*”.

I’m probably gonna start posting fankai here now. I’ve been posting my guys in the Yo-kai Craft server for a while now and I’ve gotten pretty good reception, so I’d like to show more people now.