#abberant text posts

[abberantmachine]

I have more thoughts about this but let me leave you with these for now, to be continued?

[abberantmachine]

man... I really do hate to be That Guy but there is something morbidly funny about... ok...

Knights of Guinevere seems interesting enough. I would be lying if I didn't say I find the premise cool and the characters interesting.

yeah. and we love to see critiques of capitalism.

yeah, KOG, it is kind of shit that Disney's plastic merch just ends up in oceans or goes into landfill

...huh?

you want me to buy your plastic charms...?

uh.

hm.

ok.

[abberantmachine]

I wanna make a post compiling some more articulated thoughts on Nestor's anatomy but also God is it obvious that I'm like. obsessed.

[abberantmachine]

i keep forgetting it but I think it would be funny as hell if Monty was partially missing one of his boobs from fire damage and he keeps joking about it being "improvised top surgery"

[abberantmachine]

OK I think I figured out something else that's interesting -

from looking at his videos, I think Frankie uses a 16x16 checkerboard grid to eyeball the size of his sprites

most human adults are about 6-7 tiles high, 8 tiles seems to be the upper range

I think it's a bit clearer to see with a 32x32 grid actually

pretty much all of them fall between 3-4 tiles high in this case

might be a worthwhile guideline to set up.

[abberantmachine]

I'll do a bit of a play-by-play since the video itself is a little hard to make sense of on its own: here's Frankie's speedpaint of the leech-man sprite

he typically starts off with a black silhouette done with a chunkier pixel brush and roughs out a bit more definition

he really does "paint" with pixels, building up in layers, giving extra attention to the mouth - he also changes the lower body a couple times, so blocking things out in rough strokes gives him more freedom to experiment with the overall shape

it's interesting because you see also in the David sprite speedpaint, after getting a rough sense of the initial shape it looks like the face gets more attention - so he works from head to body, or in this case top to bottom.

as he goes over adding more highlights and extra detail, he uses the opportunity to clean up the outline - all LO sprites have a 1px black outline, but black lines are also used for things like separate limbs, items of clothing and distinctive creases

the legs take their final shape a bit later than the head, and again, the head gets preference for highlights and extra details comparatively.

like ok this is pretty lengthy but it's also interesting to compare the hilariously scuffed rough draft sprites of the Eugestor sequence to the newer cleaner ones - because it's actually Nestor's throat-mouth that gets the most detail in these, rather than his face, and it gives you a sense of how Frankie blocks out colour.

like it's clear that initially, getting the details of Nestor's face exactly precise was less important than conveying the visceral horror of what he does to Eugene, particularly since his face is heavily deformed and distorted anyway.

[abberantmachine]

God I hope the “AI” bubble bursts soon. I hope everyone sobers up and quickly withdraws all their slop out of humiliation.

I hope by the time I’m well enough to study again I won’t be faced with clunky drivel “adapted from ChatGPT prompts” as the basis of the work I do - quizzes and essay questions should be developed by teachers to hone in on a skillset, as determined by lived experience, not some weird ambiguous nonsense spat out by an algorithm

[abberantmachine]

feel that way also when artists complain about like, drawing backgrounds.

it's not like... a punishment, y'know. you can take to it however you want. approach it in a way that makes you excited about it.

you like playing with colours? start there, just block out a bunch of pretty colours and turn that into a scene

you like playing with light? harsh contrast can be one way of eliminating masses of time intensive detail, you'd be surprised how little information you really need to convey a sense of space - focusing just on areas cast in light and having most of the background be dark and unreadable is one way to focus on a very contained portion of space and not get too hung up on it

you can build a background just out of geometric patterns if that's your thing, that could be a fun exercise

if you're mostly interested in posing characters, start there - think about different ways you could fit a character into the scene, different interactions and angles

if perspective frustrates you, lean into the wonkiness of it - exaggerate it, play with it. don't feel like you have to have mathematical precision if that drives you bonkers.

if you can roughly chunk something up into foreground, midground and background with loose shapes and marks, that's fine.

of course it's amazing when you can really pull out the stops, but it's not worth it if it stops you from wanting to draw at all.