#centibyte

[synthaphone]

I ended up staying up and finishing all of the basic Centibyte poses + painting them pretty colors :)

It feels so nice to finally have their other 8 pre-conversion poses figured out!! They didn't really feel 'complete' without them to me.

the rest of their pre and post-conversion style colors can be viewed here! [https://synthaphone.neocities.org/centibytes]

[atapi]

my half of an art trade with @synthaphone! their 'sona is so fun to draw... nice colours and shapes! the little critter flying is synth's fan neopet design, a centibyte. check em out on their tumblr

[synthaphone]

I love how Neopets draws water (ie. water PB pets) but when I try to copy them it always looks weird, do you have any advice on replicating it?

ooh, let me see- i've only ever tried to replicate it once, with the Water Centibyte:

my favorite water pets are the Kyrii and the Zafara, so those two were the ones I referenced most heavily when I was designing this!

I apologize in advance for not necessarily knowing how best to describe this, but in short, I think I'd recommend

laying down a base gradient for darker areas that you can then add hand-painted caustic detail over on a different layer

make extremities that you'd want to be clearly visible lighter/higher contrast (The Zafara and Kyrii both have lighter colored hands and feet, light colored tails and hair, and faces where you can make out the eyes and facial expression due to having contrasting areas of light and dark next to each other. I find it helpful sometimes to squint at what I'm working on to see if I can still roughly make out its shape, vs everything turning into a same colored blob)

consider keeping thinner pieces of a design like 'sheets' of hair lighter, and maybe visibly darker spots where you'd realistically 'see through' the sheet of water

Honestly I mostly was winging it + heavily referencing those two pets, but looking at irl photos of pools and ocean waves would probably be a good idea too- you can sort of build up a sense memory for how light interacts with water, that can make it easier to stylize or 'cheat' it.

If you want my long attempt to remember wtf my process was for the Centibyte in particular, i've put it under the cut :)

Water is a color that's pretty reliant on gradients, and where the shading and detail work on top of that base gradient really make it shine. Both of my reference pets have their darkest area around their neck and shoulders, and get lighter towards their extremities, so the first thing I did (after making my lineart edits to the hair to get the splashy effect, and recoloring the eyes to match the Kyrii and Zafara) was lay down some base gradients.

I believe i used the gradient tool first to establish main dark-to-light gradient from the head to the feet, and then later went in with a lasso tool to add smaller gradients to the ends of the arms, and probably used the soft brush to add that lighter marking to the face and to make the feet even lighter. (The belly marking I add later will cover up that jaggedy spot on the belly, so it didn't matter that it looks weird)

After that, I added simple gradients to the shell and belly markings too:

I have these on separate layers already, so it was relatively simple to lock the layers and throw more gradients over them.

After that I seem to have started to add stylized water caustic effects!

Note that I'm extremely inexperienced at painting or rendering water, so I was just sort of eyeballing how it looked on the two pets I was referencing, in addition to considering what looked good to me. I used a couple different low opacity multiply layers to do the darker markings on the body and the belly, and a 100% opaque normal layer to paint the lighter markings onto the feet (which also have a gradient on them, so that they'd match the gradient they were being drawn on top of)

After that I... seem to have just gone buckwild and started painting shit with the opaque hard brush.

I mimicked the hands on the Zafara being a less green shade of blue, and sort of gradiated that color out manually by painting on the lighter colors with a few blobby splashes and caustic patterns to make them feel blended. (I don't think anything I painted on these layers has an actual gradient, soft shading, or lowered opacity). I also added lighter outlines and a few bright white highlights to the arms, to give them that shiny jelly-like effect.

For the belly, I also just kind of went wild painting more caustic patterns- my main goal was feeling acceptably "watery" while also keeping the basic shape of the belly marking distinct from the background. The lighter blue marking in the middle of the belly (and at the bottom of it) is supposed to be underlighting that's reflecting back up.

For the lighter splashy 'hair' parts of the design, I tried to focus on getting the basic background colors in before worrying too much about where the highlights would go, knowing I could do those on a different layer afterwards. I tried to use the darkest blues at the spots where the curved hair shapes overlap each other, and also copied the head colors for the parts of the mohawk that would be thin and overlap the darker shell of the head.

I decided to sort of transition that darker shell part out 'early' instead of following it all the way through to that back antenna, so that the hair would stand out from the shell, and also because the antenna gets further away in perspective as it extends past the head.

Then I threw on a shadow layer for the shell, and then (confusingly) I made another layer on top where I added highlights AND obscured the last two segments of the tail and the knees with gradient layers. I think I felt that they didn't feel 'water' enough?

I added highlights and additional caustics for those elements on another layer afterward, with another opaque layer:

Then we have the spots and stripes markings + area specific colored lineart:

Aaaand some causticy-wavey lighting for the hair + blending of the head antennas into their hair, because it felt very abrupt for Water:

For the 'hair' highlights, I used a mix of pure white and very light blue- I probably could have made my life easier by doing a gradient on these areas, but for whatever reason I hand painted them. You'll notice in close ups that it can look a little sloppy, but if it looks decent at the size you intend the piece to be viewed at, this doesn't really matter.

And that's the finished piece! (identical to the one above, i just hid the refs)

No idea if this will be helpful, but I hope its at the very least interesting!! I viewed a lot of the more difficult Centibyte colors as challenges and puzzles to solve- its fun trying to reverse engineer very specific aesthetics I'd never tried to tackle before. I wish you luck and hope you have fun in the future with your watery neopets endeavors!!!

[synthaphone]

picking at these again... it would be so nice to complete all 9 basic poses

[synthaphone]

well, i finished this, and it looks nice!!

...so i'm doing to have to rework it; its just not janky enough for me when scaled down. it doesn't feel authentic!!!

to be fair, the acara is a weird point of comparison because i was referencing more complicated designs like the draik and elephante, and they also have more shading than the acara.

...but even compared to the draik, it feels off.

so I'm gonna do a second pass- I'm going to try messing with the colors, since i think the darkness of the shell is one of the things throwing it off, and a lot of pets species had a pastel phase in the early days of the site. might also try cutting back on how many shading layers there are- i was trying to keep things simple, but the end result is just too polished looking, haha.

there's also the chance that the lines and pose are just too modern looking. so if i can't get the effect i want by tweaking the colors and shading, i'll probably redo it entirely.

anyway here's the other 4 colors as a thanks for reading this far. :)

[synthaphone]

a new paint brush color release means a new Centibyte color- here's the 25th Anniversary Centibyte!

[See the rest of the Centibyte colors and artwork here!]

[synthaphone]

finished the Mutant Centibyte!! gonna make the converted one tomorrow

[synthaphone]

finished the Halloween Centibyte!! I went over all of the official Halloween pet designs and wasn’t sure what i wanted to do with this one, but ultimately decided to go with a spider theme. I made the extra arms and cape wearables, which I think will make for some fun crosspaint potential!