Rococospade

Rococo/Ro/Spade/Coco. I'm a character illustrator and writer who likes (dark) fantasy settings. Reblogs appreciated! Shop: https://rococospade.bigcartel.com

[rococospade]

✨Links✨

My prints and merch shop - Deluxe prints bundle now available

My art tag

My ao3

Current projects:

Garden of Insight tarot deck contributor. The long awaited Bloodborne deck, back from the dead and shinier than before. (Sales open until 7/2/26)

Murcielago/Ulquiorra Zine contributor (in fulfillment! Leftover sales open as of 6/14/26! The merch I designed is up a la cart in the store too!)

Pantera/Grimmjow Zine contributor and mod (creation period. Preorders start later this year)

[rococospade]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapter 8: Mina

Jun turned out of the alley and into the shop. Maki was leaning on the counter; Enyō mostly had his back toward the entrance, and he was talking. “Well, what do you want for din—” he turned a little, enough that he caught sight of Jun in his periphery. Jun blinked at him and Enyō’s voice went strangled and jumped half an octave. “—oh hell what the fuck Atsushi where did you come from.”

Jun set the jug on the counter and eyed his cousin, a little disdainful. “Aren’t you a spy? Shouldn’t you, you know, be listening?”

--- “You’ll need to start looking soon,” Matsuyo told Juzō, shaking him out of his thoughts.

“Auntie, I turned twelve a few months ago.”

“Plenty old enough to start.” Matsuyo’s eyes glinted in the way particular to women playing nuptial politics. Juzō was very acquainted with the look. “Why, when my son was your age—”

He was not to know what, precisely, old lady Matsuyo’s son had done at his age. They discovered this as a pair; there was a bang of someone kicking open the shop doors, whereupon the crowd’s murmuring rose to an abrupt clatter, impossible to ignore.

-- The boys spend some time with family.

[rococospade]

When you've made it out of the woods, remember to let the wounds shut.

[biocrafthero]

[rococospade]

When you've made it out of the woods, remember to let the wounds shut.

[tsunflowers]

reading a historical romance novel and reflecting on the way these stories often present woke nobility for the contemporary reader. a big thing is servants. you can’t not have servants in those times but many modern readers think “but I would never have servants. it would be so weird to have servants” and in order to make the protagonists of the story more relatable they are actually friends with the servants. but flip your perspective and think of it from the side of the servants. wouldn’t it be so awful if your boss was always trying to be friends with you. a really common thing you’ll see is the woke baronet having tea in the kitchen with the servants bc he’s not like other baronets. but what if your boss wanted to hang out and talk during your lunch break every day. not so charming when you think about it that way

[ariaste]

#okay but now what is the optimal way to be a good boss in this situation i genuinely wanna know#its easy to guess what makes a bad boss or a mid boss. but what is a good boss#specifically in such a highly structured hierarchal situation (via @rainbowroach)

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"

(for more discussions of the ethics of fealty and what it means to be a good boss when you are an exquisitely beautiful twink of a prince with a hot beefy bodyguard.... [fingerguns] read A Taste of Gold and Iron)

[c3rnunnos]

@rococospade-main

[yaperolspritz]

I got my first scam comment on AO3 today and while I'm disappointed, I'm not too beaten up about it. I know my worth as an author and am confident in my abilities. I have metrics other than hit counts that give me external validation when I need it (because sometimes we all need it). If one bot comment gets through, it's just mildly disappointing. My mood doesn't plummet. I shrug and delete it.

What bothers me is something people probably already know, but I hadn't considered: my partner and I strongly suspect these bots target fics with low hit counts. And I think that is so fucking insidious it makes me want to tear my hair out. I remember being a teenager who wanted to write something so good it because The Fic of the fandom. That never happened, but when people did comment--real people, who had lives outside the Internet, who found my fic without knowing who I was--it was the coolest feeling in the world! People liked my work! I had to post another chapter, because someone out there wanted more. It was inspiring, and fanfic was a fun way to improve my writing skills and contribute to a fandom. A community, even.

But a lot of the metrics of "you're a good author" that I have are not things everyone does. The biggest of those is IRL friends who will read my work. My partner is someone who's been reading my stuff since 7th grade. We have always had each other to create worlds together and share stories we'd secretly written in class. Having that strong partnership established gave me a foundation for sharing my work more broadly. Outside of online communities, I could share what I poured my heart and soul into and be understood. But for people who don't have that kind of support in person, engagement in online fandom is that source of readership. People who post their work want it to be seen. But when the comments roll in and it turns out that gushing fan is just a scammer, it's discouraging. It's like they're screaming into the void. Fake engagement gets people's hopes up and shoots them down. It is worse than no engagement at all.

A fic could have a low hit count for reasons outside of writing quality (small fandom, unpopular ship, no ship at all, lost in the shuffle, etc). But fanfic isn't really about quality. Writing skills can develop. Arguably, fanfic should also be for one's personal enjoyment--it is one of the most self-indulgent things you can do--but fanfic is also about community. When that community is a ghost town propped up by robots, undoubtedly, people won't venture out.

So, what to do about all this? I guess all I can say as a concrete call to action is if you're reading a fic and you're enjoying it, don't be afraid to comment. It doesn't have to be deep, but it does have to be real. Remember what it was like to start out. Make sure the next generation of fic writers has the chance to experience a fanfic community that isn't full of sleazy ghosts.

[rococospade]

Fairytales set

[revivaldivinations]

We're coming to a close for our Backerkit campaign! Preorders will be ending at July 2nd, 2am EDT!

No sales will be offered after our Backerkit closes, so make sure you don't miss out!

And don't forget all the stretch-goals we've unlocked so far! From the Moon Card coffee mug, to the Cleric Beast tee-shirt, and we're so close to unlocking the Altar Cloth at 15k!

Make sure to check them out and more, here at Backerkit!

[rococospade]

Wiggling this enticingly.

The project is full of beautiful art we’ve poured blood and tears and soul into. The guidebook text is completely unique — it’s microfiction on top of being a guide for using the deck.

And! The rune stickers, moon mug, bookmarks, bookplate, altar cloth, and divination coin all have unique designs to complement the deck art.

There’s less than two days left to pledge. Thank you again to everyone who’s liked, shared, ordered from the backerkit, or otherwise supported the project. We couldn’t do this without you, and we are eternally grateful <3

[rococospade]

Five hours remain! We unlocked the altar cloth at 14k as a celebration of how far the project’s come. Thank you all loads and loads

(Also, if you haven’t seen it, there’s a post about the misadventure behind the altar cloth’s design on this blog and the backerkit!)

[rococospade]

Did I make the wrong call on this altar cloth design?

The sales campaign for Garden of Insight tarot is winding down now (as of writing this, it ends in about 12 hours!). You guys have been so kind and enthusiastic about this project, and that means the world to us! We're a small team of artists and writers with a variety of skillsets, and this was... a really big job for us! With more than a few hiccups behind the scenes. We want to thank you again for all of your support -- so, with permission from Dovenart, I got permission to post a little story to commemorate the close of the campaign. Here's a loose, mostly accurate account of the making-of our 15k stretch goal: the altar cloth.

Recently I had a problem.

I agreed to do a design for a Bloodborne fan project. This part doesn’t sound that bad, and mostly it’s not. It’s really cool! I love Bloodborne, and I’ve already done several illustrations for the project. I definitely wanted to do it, in an abstract way divorced from logistics like time and problem solving. I needed to do a design for an altar cloth that would complement the rest of the project art… while we had a boatload of other work on our plates, and I was struggling to concept anything.

Ah. Whoops. 

Perhaps agreeing to do the merch design under those circumstances was impolitic, but we carry on. In my own defense: I agreed to it with conditions. @dovenart would do the basic concept and sketch (or composite) the layout, and I would reuse some assets from the text frames and draw in new content as necessary. (Ideally the less, the better). It would definitely match, it would look cool, we could high-five for a job well done and get metaphorical smoothies (due to the unfortunate two day drive between our homes, Dovenart and I cannot actually meet for smoothies with any ease or regularity. This country is too big). Overall I considered this to be a very good deal. Dovenart had to do the hard part, after all.

(“I can’t finish anything right now. If I can sketch it and you finish it, that works,” Dovenart said, apparently believing that he’d got the better end of things. I did not disabuse him of the notion. In general, if you can convince your coworkers that the job you don’t want to do is the easier one, you will have a happy work life. Sometimes I even remember this when it’s useful.) 

So he did a composite sketch using the assets we’d already made for the guidebook. You can see it here, and it’s pretty solid. It’s a gorgeous teal that matches most of the cards, it reuses existing assets in new ways (why fix what isn’t broken? Don’t! Keep using it until it does break. Then cry) and it shouldn’t distract from the cards themselves. It’s a good concept. 

I looked at his composite. I thought about the workflow I’d need to convert it into a working, print-quality file. I agreed to it, really quite happily. This was great! He’d done the hard part! I just had to do the moderately fiddly part where I fought the vector lineart into new shapes. Awesome. We are so good at this.

Yeah… and then I did that thing. You know the thing artists do? “Well it’s already mostly done and I have so many other things to do”, and then we put it in a box and don’t think about it until the deadline is there, looming, with teeth. Haha. Whoops. 

So the week of the deadline came. It sat in the room with me, watching, judging (I had a few days before it was properly due, so threats could be made but the teeth would not close on me yet) while I sat down to work on the cloth. Objectively it was not hard work, but I struggled to care about it. I just… couldn’t get myself to focus on it. We’ve all been there, right? It’s probably a complexity disorder or something. I was on track to get it done for the deadline, though, and I told myself that was the important part. Sometimes you have to, to get the work finished.

A few days into this process of committing myself to Work, I was dozing in bed. And then I was struck by a powerful image. This is already pretty weird for me — I have trouble picturing things with any clarity, and a lot of my artwork is an exploratory process for visual ideas. But not that morning. There was an image in my head, shockingly formed, of an altar cloth design based on Gehrman’s boss arena. It was very cool! It captivated me… maybe because I was half-asleep, but shh. The idea got me out of bed that morning, determined to try to do this lineart heavy landscape design… as an artist who struggles with both lineart and backgrounds.

And then I did the thing you really shouldn’t do, as an artist on a group project: I jumped into something that hadn’t been agreed to.

To be clear, this was a risky decision. It wasn’t what we’d discussed. It might not work. I had a deadline.

But… it was really cool and the image wouldn’t leave me, so. I went for it. I made a new layer in the working file and started scribbling. I told myself I could recover from the time lost, if Dovenart sat me down and said “Spade that’s neat but it’s not going to work for this.” It would be well-within his right. I went after the idea with the slightly manic fervor of a player out of blood vials after a boss with low health. It was probably not going to end in my favour but damned if I wouldn’t try.

The result of that scribbling:

This is how Dovenart woke up to several texts from me to the effect of: it’s okay if you have to tell me no and I know we discussed the other but consider that this would be really pretty—

(I start a lot of conversations like this. Not all of them, but definitely more than two or three a year. I’m not entirely sure why he keeps letting me message him. He says it’s because we’re friends, but I can’t rule out the possibility that he’s observing me like a nature documentary.)

FYI the first sketch I sent him looked like hot trash. I wasn’t entirely convinced, as I drew it, that I could make the idea good outside of my head. But the demons were persuasive. I really wanted it to work. So yeah. I made this very rough sketch and thought: … I might be able to pull this off. This is not an encouraging sentiment to present to prospective clients or art mods, “I might be able to”, but it is the sentiment that existed in my heart. 

But not to worry! By the time Dovenart was awake I’d already sent him several other updates, with colour. Feast your eyes here:

I was racing the clock. I needed to make something polished enough to sell this idea — to myself, to Dovenart, to the demons? Probably all of these — without wasting a minute more than necessary, in case it did flop and I was back to finishing the agreed on piece.

(As an interesting aside, past the lineart stage I was doing as much of this as possible with a computer mouse instead of my tablet. I’m not honestly sure why. I was very against scooting my chair down to the tablet section of my workstation.)

The tile stand-in was bothering me a lot, so I took a break from the main file to make a bigger, hopefully seamless tile of the tea-stained papers we used for the guidebook. I figured it would probably help my case if the texture for the piece looked good instead of like I'd composited in a kaleidoscope shot. Again, for some reason, mostly with the mouse? A textured eraser and masks were my friend, but... why did I do this to myself?

The updated texture buoyed my hopes. Yes, this could work.

Also, I'm sure some of you are holding out on the hope that the way I'm writing here is for dramatic effect. And to that I say yes, but:

this really is how I text people. I'm not kidding about what he came online to.

But I was fighting the tile. So, around the time I was achieving this level of delusion, Dovenart responded to my nonsense:

Cue gremlin cheers. Yes! We are getting a good grade in deviating from the plan! I continued spamming him--I mean, sending updates.

Including one with a vectorised frame (based on the ones @whitecatarts did for the meet the contributors graphics, actually. Go check out their art if you haven't, they do phenomenal work. So much pretty filigree!). There's also one nightmarish version of the design with the linear dodge layer mode on that I'm still oddly attached to.

And now that Dovenart had officially signed off on my nonsense, I just needed to get this cleaned up and sent over.

I left it alone for the night -- assured it would be done on time -- so that my eyes could take a break.

The next day I went back for final tweaks. There was a fair bit of back and forth on those regarding how fine was too fine for printing, esp for the moss details and the particle effects, but that isn't nearly as funny as me jumpscaring the headmod with a last minute change so we're going to gloss over it.

What you do need to know is that I sent over what was supposed to be a final image, this:

And then I started muddling around with the colours of the sky in the file, because it was still missing a certain something (Why? It might actually kill me to leave well enough alone: best not risk it)… and I found a blue layer with a small section masked out.

(Yeah my file set up is a confusing mess. I can't even say it was because I couldn't reach the keyboard like usual. I just live like this. I'm neater when I have to share the file with someone else, but that was not in play here.)

What was I doing with that? So I turned it on and toggled through a few layer modes, settling on hard light...

Oh.

This is, again, not what was discussed. But I really liked the result of it. I'd already pushed my luck a lot this week. Surely I shouldn't...

But... but pretty. So I sent a screenshot of it anyway, as an alt. Giving the head mod options is generally not a bad thing. And I shared the screenshot to some friends, because... because.

The consensus was that the blue needed to stay. ... so once again I bushwhacked Dovenart with a major, unplanned change, albeit not as major as changing the design completely...

Thankfully he was too tired to chase me with a stick, like I deserved.

Success! Job well done. I sent off the files and do my best not to think about all the project etiquette rules I have tramped all over that week.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. But... I do have to wonder, did we make a mistake not going with the original idea?

[rococospade]

People really like the altar cloth, so we ended up making it available as an add-on a little early :D I’m thrilled! You can grab yours at the backerkit. (The design can be viewed at the bottom of the read more)

[rococospade]

Did I make the wrong call on this altar cloth design?

The sales campaign for Garden of Insight tarot is winding down now (as of writing this, it ends in about 12 hours!). You guys have been so kind and enthusiastic about this project, and that means the world to us! We're a small team of artists and writers with a variety of skillsets, and this was... a really big job for us! With more than a few hiccups behind the scenes. We want to thank you again for all of your support -- so, with permission from Dovenart, I got permission to post a little story to commemorate the close of the campaign. Here's a loose, mostly accurate account of the making-of our 15k stretch goal: the altar cloth.

Recently I had a problem.

I agreed to do a design for a Bloodborne fan project. This part doesn’t sound that bad, and mostly it’s not. It’s really cool! I love Bloodborne, and I’ve already done several illustrations for the project. I definitely wanted to do it, in an abstract way divorced from logistics like time and problem solving. I needed to do a design for an altar cloth that would complement the rest of the project art… while we had a boatload of other work on our plates, and I was struggling to concept anything.

Ah. Whoops. 

Perhaps agreeing to do the merch design under those circumstances was impolitic, but we carry on. In my own defense: I agreed to it with conditions. @dovenart would do the basic concept and sketch (or composite) the layout, and I would reuse some assets from the text frames and draw in new content as necessary. (Ideally the less, the better). It would definitely match, it would look cool, we could high-five for a job well done and get metaphorical smoothies (due to the unfortunate two day drive between our homes, Dovenart and I cannot actually meet for smoothies with any ease or regularity. This country is too big). Overall I considered this to be a very good deal. Dovenart had to do the hard part, after all.

(“I can’t finish anything right now. If I can sketch it and you finish it, that works,” Dovenart said, apparently believing that he’d got the better end of things. I did not disabuse him of the notion. In general, if you can convince your coworkers that the job you don’t want to do is the easier one, you will have a happy work life. Sometimes I even remember this when it’s useful.) 

So he did a composite sketch using the assets we’d already made for the guidebook. You can see it here, and it’s pretty solid. It’s a gorgeous teal that matches most of the cards, it reuses existing assets in new ways (why fix what isn’t broken? Don’t! Keep using it until it does break. Then cry) and it shouldn’t distract from the cards themselves. It’s a good concept. 

I looked at his composite. I thought about the workflow I’d need to convert it into a working, print-quality file. I agreed to it, really quite happily. This was great! He’d done the hard part! I just had to do the moderately fiddly part where I fought the vector lineart into new shapes. Awesome. We are so good at this.

Yeah… and then I did that thing. You know the thing artists do? “Well it’s already mostly done and I have so many other things to do”, and then we put it in a box and don’t think about it until the deadline is there, looming, with teeth. Haha. Whoops. 

So the week of the deadline came. It sat in the room with me, watching, judging (I had a few days before it was properly due, so threats could be made but the teeth would not close on me yet) while I sat down to work on the cloth. Objectively it was not hard work, but I struggled to care about it. I just… couldn’t get myself to focus on it. We’ve all been there, right? It’s probably a complexity disorder or something. I was on track to get it done for the deadline, though, and I told myself that was the important part. Sometimes you have to, to get the work finished.

A few days into this process of committing myself to Work, I was dozing in bed. And then I was struck by a powerful image. This is already pretty weird for me — I have trouble picturing things with any clarity, and a lot of my artwork is an exploratory process for visual ideas. But not that morning. There was an image in my head, shockingly formed, of an altar cloth design based on Gehrman’s boss arena. It was very cool! It captivated me… maybe because I was half-asleep, but shh. The idea got me out of bed that morning, determined to try to do this lineart heavy landscape design… as an artist who struggles with both lineart and backgrounds.

And then I did the thing you really shouldn’t do, as an artist on a group project: I jumped into something that hadn’t been agreed to.

To be clear, this was a risky decision. It wasn’t what we’d discussed. It might not work. I had a deadline.

But… it was really cool and the image wouldn’t leave me, so. I went for it. I made a new layer in the working file and started scribbling. I told myself I could recover from the time lost, if Dovenart sat me down and said “Spade that’s neat but it’s not going to work for this.” It would be well-within his right. I went after the idea with the slightly manic fervor of a player out of blood vials after a boss with low health. It was probably not going to end in my favour but damned if I wouldn’t try.

The result of that scribbling:

This is how Dovenart woke up to several texts from me to the effect of: it’s okay if you have to tell me no and I know we discussed the other but consider that this would be really pretty—

(I start a lot of conversations like this. Not all of them, but definitely more than two or three a year. I’m not entirely sure why he keeps letting me message him. He says it’s because we’re friends, but I can’t rule out the possibility that he’s observing me like a nature documentary.)

FYI the first sketch I sent him looked like hot trash. I wasn’t entirely convinced, as I drew it, that I could make the idea good outside of my head. But the demons were persuasive. I really wanted it to work. So yeah. I made this very rough sketch and thought: … I might be able to pull this off. This is not an encouraging sentiment to present to prospective clients or art mods, “I might be able to”, but it is the sentiment that existed in my heart. 

But not to worry! By the time Dovenart was awake I’d already sent him several other updates, with colour. Feast your eyes here:

I was racing the clock. I needed to make something polished enough to sell this idea — to myself, to Dovenart, to the demons? Probably all of these — without wasting a minute more than necessary, in case it did flop and I was back to finishing the agreed on piece.

(As an interesting aside, past the lineart stage I was doing as much of this as possible with a computer mouse instead of my tablet. I’m not honestly sure why. I was very against scooting my chair down to the tablet section of my workstation.)

The tile stand-in was bothering me a lot, so I took a break from the main file to make a bigger, hopefully seamless tile of the tea-stained papers we used for the guidebook. I figured it would probably help my case if the texture for the piece looked good instead of like I'd composited in a kaleidoscope shot. Again, for some reason, mostly with the mouse? A textured eraser and masks were my friend, but... why did I do this to myself?

The updated texture buoyed my hopes. Yes, this could work.

Also, I'm sure some of you are holding out on the hope that the way I'm writing here is for dramatic effect. And to that I say yes, but:

this really is how I text people. I'm not kidding about what he came online to.

But I was fighting the tile. So, around the time I was achieving this level of delusion, Dovenart responded to my nonsense:

Cue gremlin cheers. Yes! We are getting a good grade in deviating from the plan! I continued spamming him--I mean, sending updates.

Including one with a vectorised frame (based on the ones @whitecatarts did for the meet the contributors graphics, actually. Go check out their art if you haven't, they do phenomenal work. So much pretty filigree!). There's also one nightmarish version of the design with the linear dodge layer mode on that I'm still oddly attached to.

And now that Dovenart had officially signed off on my nonsense, I just needed to get this cleaned up and sent over.

I left it alone for the night -- assured it would be done on time -- so that my eyes could take a break.

The next day I went back for final tweaks. There was a fair bit of back and forth on those regarding how fine was too fine for printing, esp for the moss details and the particle effects, but that isn't nearly as funny as me jumpscaring the headmod with a last minute change so we're going to gloss over it.

What you do need to know is that I sent over what was supposed to be a final image, this:

And then I started muddling around with the colours of the sky in the file, because it was still missing a certain something (Why? It might actually kill me to leave well enough alone: best not risk it)… and I found a blue layer with a small section masked out.

(Yeah my file set up is a confusing mess. I can't even say it was because I couldn't reach the keyboard like usual. I just live like this. I'm neater when I have to share the file with someone else, but that was not in play here.)

What was I doing with that? So I turned it on and toggled through a few layer modes, settling on hard light...

Oh.

This is, again, not what was discussed. But I really liked the result of it. I'd already pushed my luck a lot this week. Surely I shouldn't...

But... but pretty. So I sent a screenshot of it anyway, as an alt. Giving the head mod options is generally not a bad thing. And I shared the screenshot to some friends, because... because.

The consensus was that the blue needed to stay. ... so once again I bushwhacked Dovenart with a major, unplanned change, albeit not as major as changing the design completely...

Thankfully he was too tired to chase me with a stick, like I deserved.

Success! Job well done. I sent off the files and do my best not to think about all the project etiquette rules I have tramped all over that week.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. But... I do have to wonder, did we make a mistake not going with the original idea?

[rococospade]

[revivaldivinations]

We're coming to a close for our Backerkit campaign! Preorders will be ending at July 2nd, 2am EDT!

No sales will be offered after our Backerkit closes, so make sure you don't miss out!

And don't forget all the stretch-goals we've unlocked so far! From the Moon Card coffee mug, to the Cleric Beast tee-shirt, and we're so close to unlocking the Altar Cloth at 15k!

Make sure to check them out and more, here at Backerkit!

[rococospade]

Wiggling this enticingly.

The project is full of beautiful art we’ve poured blood and tears and soul into. The guidebook text is completely unique — it’s microfiction on top of being a guide for using the deck.

And! The rune stickers, moon mug, bookmarks, bookplate, altar cloth, and divination coin all have unique designs to complement the deck art.

There’s less than two days left to pledge. Thank you again to everyone who’s liked, shared, ordered from the backerkit, or otherwise supported the project. We couldn’t do this without you, and we are eternally grateful <3

[revivaldivinations]

The Chime Maiden as the Seeker of Torches

Painted by @dovenart

Seek Insight of our upcoming tarot deck by following the project on Backerkit! https://buff.ly/c3XcZAn

[rococospade]

[sekibeing]

#boruto 31 mtsuki VS shizuma

[kokushibe]

A water clone?!