Riccardo Leone's Art Log

[rickleone]

Mighty Princes

"Beneath the moon's enchanting light, this werewolf's song gives might! Prince Edge, ready to unleash the night's radiant power!" Yes, I said orcs, but every creature can be a Mighty Prince, if he’s willing to carry around 200 kilos of muscle mass and over-sized lower canines that make you talk funny.

About Magical Girls…

Target audience is quite the problem with the magical girl genre nowadays. It’s impressive how Sailor Moon was the only one that managed to break out its niche of shojo anime and become mainstream almost like Dragonball is. The battle shonen has quite evolved since the early 90s, but the magical girl genre seems more confined than ever, and the only proprieties that get noticed outside of the circle are the deconstructive ones, like Madoka Magica. And what is the circle I’m talking about? The targeted demographic? Well, I can say that’s not me. Because I’m not an elementary school girl and nor a straight Otaku either.

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[rickleone]

Mighty Prince Hoof

"Amidst ancient woods where echoes softly play, I, Prince Hoof, in unicorn array. Satyr of the shadows, dance with me, as I weave enchantments wild and free!" Prince Hoof is the battle name of Bron by Vivid Syntax, who decides to wear the colors and the attire of King Sombra from MlP Friendship is Magic, which, I must admit is a pretty scary villain. Sailor Moon and Friendship is Magic have a bunch of things in common, not just because the original writer of MlPFiM was clearly influenced by the anime (just look at her Galaxy Girls series) but also because they manage to pick a premise that was very girl-targeted and put enough comedy, drama and action to make it enjoyable by people from every gender and age group. 

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[rickleone]

Mighty Prince Knukle

They're powerful, they're colorful, they channel the forces of Hell to fight the evil Angels, they're the Mighty Princes! "From the the hazy peaks where natural disorder reigns, flows the ape spirit bursting in my veins. I'm Prince Knuckle, ready to unleash primal justice!" So yeah, I'm doing it, for real. The last time I re-watched Sailor Moon (it's my comfort media) I thought "wouldn't be fun if instead of pretty magical girls in miniskirts there were husky magical orcs in shorts but they were as silly and wholesome as the original?”

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[rickleone]

Orc Space Rogue - Reference Sheet

Who said that rogues have to be skinny, broody guys with long, dark capes? This guy weighs like a cow and risks hyperthermia if wearing something that covers his nipples, and he's the best rogue in his quadrant. Mostly because of his hacking and social engineering skills, but that's the good part of having magic: physical limitations don't mean anything. I've tried a bit with a more sci-fi flavor for what little I dress up my guys, because I like the bigger scale sci-fi stories tend to have and the fact you're more comfortable with giving characters a contemporary mindset. The guy is kind of my basic-bitch humanoid. Something I tend to draw when I don't think about it too much, and you might have seen iterations of him in my very early works. I mean, pre-purge Tumblr era, so I liked to give him a new embodiment in this design, which I will certainly reuse in the future.

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[rickleone]

Black Bull Captain Bastoro

Uh oh, I haven't touched this character in quite a while. And I've always drawn him naked, but never how he would look on a normal work day. It turns out, in his home country, armor just gives a defense boost regardless of its appearance. Look at those fodder-fed pecs squeezed between pieces of metal and leather. I liked to lay out some aspects of his background, like the fact that he swore loyalty to the Immortal King, but his kind can wear their traditional tunic under the uniform. Another thing that will become a challenge in the future will be to have more characters of the same species on display and give them different facial features, so you can tell them apart without relying on colors and hairstyles. Bastoro is the "basic bitch" type of bull design, the one I can draw from my memory. The other ones will require more creativity.

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[rickleone]

Weregarurumon's Reference Sheet

Hey, Weregarurumon has evolved into Proteingarurumon! Gone are the too many spikes, the long, thin legs, and the impossibly large wrists. This good boy is here with the comfortable body proportions of a small truck, and he will deliver you a wild show. My Weregarurumon has a long, fluffy tail and I won't accept any criticism about that. It's in the Bandai material, and if he doesn't have one in the anime, that's because Toei is bound to milk and cheapen every IP it puts its lurid hands on. And I know that he doesn't have one of the most infamous of the Digimon games, Digimon World for PSX, but that game is just a hallucination slipped into reality. I'm replaying it, and I'm still wondering who considered it a good idea to make an RPG with a character that has to poop, eat, dinks around during combat  and might die of old age in the middle of a quest. Whoever rigged the animation of Leomon going number two in its leather pants must have had either the best or the worst time of their lives. Nothing in between. But it's still so charming. And I love with every fiber of my being that they cared to animate mob-Digimon running away after the fight, because you have just defeated them, not killed them. And also that they're smart enough to flee the fight when your companion is 1–2 levels over theirs. Something that Game Freak doesn't bother to implement 25 years later, and you still have to kill pidgeys so hard that they dematerialize just because you stumbled into one of them with your level 60 Charizard.  I think that this formula might be reworked as a sort of Rogue-like game where you don't have to spend three game days in the gym of the hub town to get your digimon ready for the wild world outside, and instead of obtaining upgrades, you obtain food or accessories necessary to steer the evolution path of your Digimon where you want to.

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[rickleone]

Wolverine - Reference Sheet

Wolverine is going to have some smoking hot action going on, so it's better for him to hold on to all of his design elements. Which are just his haircut and the yellow and black in his outfit. Wolverine, like most of the superheroes, changes face and body type depending on the artist and the vogue of the time. Hugh Jackman reshaped him in a more conventional 180mt tall gym rat, but he was always meant to look shorter and wider than the other X-Men. I can quite relate. You can see the match and many others here, warning, very NSFW! : https://bit.ly/2UN8j51

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[rickleone]

Mighty Prince Burst

Oh yeah, this Gnoll is powerful and fabulous and he's ready to turn enemy in ashes one sparkly twirl after the other. Prince Burst is the magical boy alter ego of Dimetrius, by Painbow. And this is just the teaser of my October series: Mighty Princes, an extended team of (mostly) orcs with magical boy powers that will fight the forces of evil. Yeah, Future Funk mixes brainwashed me.

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[rickleone]

Disenchantment

Disenchantment started off as the most boring and uninspired of Matt Groening's series and it ended as the most intense. The power of giving an actual plot to your story and not being back to square one by the end of the episode. Which is one of the reasons I'm not interested in Hulurama at all. 

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[rickleone]

ChatGPT

Thank god I never paid for ChatGPT because the service is getting increasingly worse. I guess because it started to be fed its own ramblings. 

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[rickleone]

Leomon's Reference Sheet

Leomon Reference Sheet - Chaps mode. I had to set myself a fixed number of scars and earrings for this big lion with bunny ears. Because the official reference is such a mess. I fixed also the girth of hands and feel and some other appendages. This cat is ready to scratch!

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[rickleone]

Autumn Header: ready to rumble!

Prepare to witness a clash of titans as the green orc and the purple gorilla step into the ring, where the roar of the crowd meets the roar of the wild! This is a showdown you won't want to miss! Guys, this took an awful lot of time. Not just because it's the third header I make, not just because I drew so many background characters I got sick of it, not just because I felt like checking the model of this wrestling arena and had to fix the horrors I made a year ago, but mostly because I wanted to step up my game: build some actual shaders in the 3D world and add a couple more layers in the 2D artwork, exploring this mysterious thing called "backlighting". Use a dirtier lineart and add some light texturing. I've also screwed myself up with making this artwork on different 3D locations, having to project and reproject on different planes of the 3D space, but Turning my art in a virtual theater of paper figurines looks pretty interesting to me, as you can see below. (Obviously you can see it if you are reading your Patreon post, but don't worry, it's a public post so click with no worry.) I still feel like I've learned something that will help me do better artwork in a slightly more efficient way, and that's the important part. If I think about my vocation in the space of gay art, it's to channel the energy usually reserved for bombastic shonen and superhero battles targeted an audience of straight dudes, too. And that's the thrill that constantly drives me.

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[rickleone]

Neon Colors Header - Forever WIP

So, I'm in search of a new header, and I wanted to try neon colors and complex geometrical backgrounds, also for reusing those skyscrapers models I've made for the Gorilla Boxing Day piece. The result is this: colorful but hard to read. If you see the skyscrapers behind are in strangely distant poses, I don't know what to do with that. They render in a different position from the editing file, and it has something to do with them being imported and edited in bulk. So before getting mad and losing hours trying to understand a very specific problem, I've decided to quit and try something different. Maybe something that vibes more with the upcoming Fall season, and with me and my style. Neon colors don't get any nostalgia out of me, since I was too young and gun-shy to appreciate 80s horror and sci-fi movies. I also struggle a lot in combining color ramps, and something with four different dominant colors competing for attention isn't the best idea for me. Also, well, they aren't quite fleshy, if you know what I mean. And the difficulties I have to orient the shaders of the 3D part, oh boy. Maybe I've just now learned to make a proper toon shader that does what I want, and just the idea of going back to this piece and editing all the shaders in the proper way gave me a headache. I wanted to wipe the slate clean and find a subject that can represent me but also be appropriate for a public header and have a clear display of Gokong that can be used as an avatar. I guess I'll keep the kaiju concept since it will represent a lot of my upcoming works, and maybe render it in a more autumnal flavor. The annual October celebration where gorillas and orcs summon the powers of the Underworld to make their champion grow and engage in a kaiju battle at dusk? It might be.

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[rickleone]

New Zangief's Outfit - Reference Sheet

So, now the official Zangief outfit implements tight spandex pants that wrap and compress his girthy legs while his upper body is free to sweat and smoke in the open air. I can't agree more. This is his outfit for the rest of the tournament as well. What tournament? Well, take a look here, but warning, it's very NSFW! https://bit.ly/2UN8j51

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[rickleone]

A Painful Jog

"Hey guys, shouldn't we do cardio too? Maybe in the early morning, so it won't interfere with anyone's schedule, and I will bring my dog, who will cheer everybody up with their enthusiasm!" And so this bunch of hypertrophic beasts learned that jogging is self-inflicted torture when every step is lifting 200+kgs of body mass with stubby cartoon legs. At least the primates do. The wolf is pretty comfortable, just a bit confused by the existence of dogs. If you're wondering why the guys have platform handles painted on their mighty not-fit-for-cardio torsos, that's because I've posted it on the dying Twitter platform and Elon would personally bury beneath the ground a tweet containing so many external links. Feel free to take note and follow me on other platforms too. Especially Mastodon. I really dig the safe space vibe of that place. Like Tumblr before the purge turned it into a den of Puriteens. And for whoever says that it will never get the traffic that Twitter gets… That's the point of decentralization. Not allowing a handful of platforms that go by the most generic, outdated, and USA-oriented content policies and outsource moderation to Third-World Countries to handle everything that is posted on the Web. 

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[rickleone]

King Kong VS Oozaru - Gorilla Boxing Day

Some more ponderous primate pounding with King Kong VS Oozaru, here for the Gorilla Boxing Day by Matthew Smith. Will the residents of the city have the common sense to evacuate or will stay there hoping to end up under the prehensile feet of these monsters? And for whoever says that an Oozaru would obliterate King Kong because it has Dragonball's power levels… That's exactly the point: the universe of Dragonball works on different rules, which make a human kid able to jump for hundreds of meters just because he worked as a slave for a creepy old guy for 8 months (I don't like Master Muten and his gatekeeping of combat techniques, he should have stayed dead) so in my headcanon if a Dragonball character traveled in another narrative universe his strength would drop to the roof set in that universe and vice versa. By the way, I'm very glad that now thanks to Powerhouse Animation we have a somewhat official cartoon design for King Kong, and in ordinary Powerhouse Animation fashion is highly bangable. Not glad at all that Powerhouse Animation when it comes to its "Western Anime" division seems stuck with rejected scripts that someone has been using as a leg replacement for their couches for the past 10 years and then decided to throw at them. I still consider Blood of Zeus the absolute worst of the bunch. The animation is stiff, the gore unnecessary, the tone pretty sexist, and everyone is an idiot, especially the villain. It feels like they wanted to do God of War but they couldn't get the rights.  MOTU Revelations was ok in the end. It suffers mostly from its own premise. MOTU was firstly a line of action figures, and as a setting for a story is very flawed, starting from the protagonist, who is both a magical chosen one and the prince of a planet. Like if Bruce Wayne was Superman. Skull Island is ok as average. Good in the last two episodes with the Kong action, pretty mediocre in the rest of the story, with an inhabited island made exclusively of apex predators and red shirts constantly thrown in their jaws. I know that it's the quota of stupid you should accept from monster movies, but I can't enjoy the witty banter of the characters thinking they've just seen a bunch of people die, taken by a tentacle monster or an ugly as fuck lion-bulldog which is also the pet of the protagonist. It's just… so messy. Especially the cliffhanger part. Oh my gods, a cliffhanger finale in the year 2023? Are you so confident that the show won't be canceled after the first season and you won't end up with a truncated story that goes nowhere? Because it still didn't get an Italian dub and this isn't a good sign. 

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[rickleone]

Gorilla Boxing Evening

The page I posted one year ago (sigh) but now with dialogues and context. Big dumb gorillas are eye candy in your crew, but not entirely reliable. Sure they can offer their own kind of show. This is Celebrity Bangmatch, a Rule 34 Tournament between cartoon brutes, where patrons get to decide who's gonna win and which fetish is going to be the win condition of the match. To vote and have early access click here. (WARNING: NSFW!)

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