Kicking off my new art blog with OC ref sheets! These are @sheydgarden's and my beloved collaborative characters/story going back to 2013 (??!??!) (and June and Laszlo, in slightly different iterations, are their characters from way longer ago even - like 2003ish?). We've never given this project a proper title, so we've spent this whole time calling it... Space Queers...
They all live on a stolen spaceship. There's trouble with ghosts. They just want to get enough money to buy some instant ramen but life has other plans.
This is... slightly less than 3/4 of a little comic I did last year, because I'm very silly and two out of three of the comics I drew last year I can't post, at least not in their entirety (the rest of this one is adult. As I'm sure you could tell. The other I can't post at all because gives away some character stuff that I want to keep secret). Planning to color this at some point.
(Drawn by me, scripted by my co-conspirator @sheydgarden. Neither of us speak Russian, apologies for any mistakes there. Original characters, more info here!)
Some character/world context for anyone who's curious:
This takes place on their ship, the Lilit. Yevgeny is the ship's medic, as much as he's able to be, anyway. He's not a doctor, he just has some field medicine training from his time in the army. Yeah, his stitching technique is unorthodox, that's on purpose. Don't worry, he autoclaves the thimble. He's claimed the recovery/observation room off of the sick bay as his bedroom, because he found the bunks in the regular crew rooms to be too cramped.
Laszlo was out at some bar on a space station (probably their ship is docked there?). There are a fair number of seedy space stations where anything goes. And Laszlo is... impulsive and has a bit of a drinking problem. Does he ever win bar fights? Absolutely not. Does this stop him? No. Boy's got a self-destructive streak.
I dug a little deep in my folders to find some older OC stuff I didn't hate, and found this silly little one-page comic from 2020. Laszlo doesn't believe in buying anything that he could steal instead (and honestly he usually doesn't have the cash anyway). Toby comes from a wildly different background and finds this pretty nerve wracking. He's also contractually obligated to apologize due to being Canadian (I mean. Canada doesn't exactly exist as such in their future, but he's from. you know. former Canada).
Been treating myself to drawing OCs in between other stuff I've had to do. I'm not planning on doing age sheets for everyone, but I really wanted to do them for June and Laszlo, as well as put those two drawings of them aged 24 and 30 into an illustration together. And then the last piece is teenaged Laszlo with someone who was very important to him.
I only want to work on OC stuff lately, however, I am being god's bravest boy and making myself work on stuff for selling at upcoming art markets. Preview of an in-progress illustration for your viewing pleasure.
hey, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who liked/reblogged my comic I posted the other day (here if anyone missed it). I was really, really touched by all the nice comments people left in the tags, especially!! I honestly thought maybe 10-20 people who mostly already knew me would see it, so this has been a very unexpected but extremely welcome morale boost. I've been reluctant to post art online for various reasons for the past few years, but I feel encouraged to keep doing so! <3
here, have an old-ish sketch of Laszlo and Toby and Ode as a thank you:
When your crush is the ship's mechanic (and resident slut) and you have to knock on his door in the middle of the night because the heat broke... but also you're awkward and inexperienced as hell, and it turns out the resident slut also just likes cuddling his friends. And yet it all works out.
(original characters, main cast here!)
I started this in Procreate just to try it out and found that I really didn't like it, so I switched back to Clip Studio on my computer, so that's why there are some line quality differences in the first few pages. I just like using my old school wacom tablet!
Another mug from last year, of bottle gentian and a bumblebee (because bottle gentian flowers never open, bumblebees are the only bees strong enough to push the petals open and pollinate them!).
The flowers were supposed to be dark purple, but the underglaze did something weird when it was fired and turned a translucent light blue, and glossy like a glaze?? That's what I get for not doing a test tile first. Still looks kinda cool.
I also wanted to get a couple of lovely antagonists in on the day... presenting Darcy Crane and her bodyguard Helka Immonen, and Pearl the ferret, bane of Helka's life:
just a little June and Laszlo interaction, early on in them knowing each other. by the time we get to what I think of as the "main story" timeline, they've been friends/lived and worked together for 6 or 7 years, but it's fun exploring their relationship when it was new.
For the past year and a half, I've been getting back into ceramics, which I hadn't done since college. I got really into doing underglaze paintings on things, like this unicorn cup!
Although I still sorta prefer how it looked before it was glazed and fired... alas.
Laszlo, Toby, and Ode. Maybe they set something on fire, or maybe atmospheric lighting conditions just manifest wherever they go. (Original characters, main cast here).
Another piece from 2014 that I still like, except I redrew Toby's hair since his design has changed since I first made the piece, and then I ended up editing several other things as well. Don't be like me, just let your ancient art stay the way it is!!
