#axondrite rambles

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Just here to drop off the kids, I stole a brush from an artist and now I’ve made 5 pieces consecutively in 24 hours

For a while now I’ve wanted to do these ambient “a small moment captured” pieces of the characters not particularly doing anything but it makes you Ponder. It makes you feel like you’re there for a second. Dunno if it works yet but I like em! I mean, I would. I made them.

Also here’s Nick in the backrooms. My friends will not stop going on about putting Nick in the backrooms. They have been drawing him in the backrooms themselves. It’s fan service atp.

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I have a Rebubble shop set up now!

For some reason they determined me a premium artist…? Is that normal?

For all my Lunglings, I have the Iron Lung collection up of course!

And for @zoizyboigy in particular, a humble Hawaii: Part II collection! 🫶

If there’s anything anyone wants that isn’t up already, let me know!

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I made Yuki a title card like Nick’s!

They’re kindle screen size, so they’re teeny tiny but I love this format so much, I wanna do all my OCs like this. Especially with Artfight coming up, it’d be good to update their character sheets 🥀

I decided I should incorporate pieces of the album’s cover itself into each character, so if Nick is the orca, I felt Yuki could be the ocean. I drew it in the style of The Wave of course (which is unironically my favourite classic art piece) to hint at his Japanese origin.

In other (kind of related) news, I’ve ended up on Japanese Twitter somehow, so amongst sending each other pictures of our pets, I picked up learning Japanese again!

Obligatory pet tax photo. This is Haku. Yes, after the Studio Ghibli dragon. I got him before the whole Japanese re-hyperfixation thing. His predecessor was called Inko (literally “parakeet” in Japanese) so. Could be worse. I went for a name Brits could possibly actually pronounce this time.

Also, I had to come crawling back to Procreate for this piece, I got a CSP subscription in the time I’ve been away 😅

Uff, after being primarily active on Twitter so long it’s nice to have a longer-form yap about my art and my life 😌🌸

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You can’t just call a guy Simon and then make him look like Markiplier, that’s like my one weakness man

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I do also have a YouTube channel now!

I have no idea what to do with it (other than uploading my short-form content there from TikTok & Insta so far) so if you have any ideas or anything you wanna see… 👀🫪

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By the way, I made my OCs in Tomodachi life and not a single moment is dull

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i had the horrid realisation while googling H:Pii stuff earlier that someone could make a Fandom page about my extended universe ???

i found someone else's for the same album and i was like oh

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I realised I got too in my own head about this piece and it sat in my drafts for months

Partly based on this song by Billie Eilish

And partly based on this photo from her photoshoot with WSJ Magazine

Social Commentary

This piece was intended as a sort of vent comparison between how Nick and Billie Eilish are treated similarly when exposed to the public.

While Nick has features that could be seen as “misleadingly” older, they’re features that the people around me as well as myself had at his age. Plus there’s the whole thing about him looking similar to other characters in more mainstream media. He’s wayyyy too overheated.

So this brought up a small dilemma: to redesign or not to redesign?

Ultimately, I decided not to (although the temptation to never goes away). I feel that I would be doing the real-world counterparts of this problem a disservice if I changed him. They can’t really redesign themselves, and why should they?

Adding to this, I rarely see male representation of this problem. Women 100% have it worse, but when it happens to men I think it gets swept under the rug or passed off as not that serious (see: Justin Bieber)

Also, I like his design. That should be reason enough.

The Making Of

This took NINETEEN HOURS and seventeen minutes*

I was so done by the time I got onto the background. Despite most of the clutter being photobashed in, it was making me want to tear my hair out.

The phone was originally yellow, like Billie’s.

There was also a section where I decided to colour the whole piece, but it looked so abysmal and unnatural I switched back to B+W. I’m not even going to show a picture of that because it looks so bad.

The finished version is not actually true black and white, it’s overlayed with a slightly soft dusty blue to contrast the red text.

*most of my pieces take 10 hours or less on average.

Note: this was written long before my recent Age Up? poll so you can tell this subject’s been on my mind for a long time.

Also: much of Billie Eilish’s discography lines up weirdly well with the Hawaii: Part II EU, especially with Nick, so if you want more of that in depth I’ll happily oblige!