I've wanted to know since I found the broken link in your Sorrow/Joy chibi page on DA - what is a boatchibi? Why are they called that? :0
Oh man, boatchibis! I used to have a page about them on my site but I took it down for whatever reason, haha. Well it's a bit of a silly story, but I might as well go into it for nostalgia's sake.
Way back in the day, I used to draw more elaborate anime-like eyes. I know how bad these look, just ignore that. Anyway, one night I was listening to Cursum Perficio by Enya. For some reason it made me think of boats, kind of big viking ships or galleons in a storm at night, fighting against huge waves. The song has nothing to do with that so I don't know where that image came from. Anyway, I ended up doodling a very tiny little chibi in a boat in a style I'd never done before as a result.
Simple little thing but I thought it was cute and ended up doodling a few more.
They were quick and fun to draw, so I ended up doodling a lot of them for various fandoms over the years.
A friend of mine suggested calling them boatchibis since they first appeared in a boat, haha. But what makes a boatchibi? I even drew a tiny guide at some point i have no memory of lol.
Basically the key points were:
line eyes
no expression
little ball hands (this varied)
usually just standing there or t-posing
In terms of serious art though I was still doing more elaborate eyes. Even more "serious" chibis still got bigger eyes, although I'd simplified the anime eyes down somewhat. This is a weird in-between period to me, around when I made Move Your Dead Bones and Things Can Only Get Gayer.
I remember the tipping point being when I first played Phoenix Wright. I ended up doodling a lot of little boatchibis for it, and eventually some of those boatchibis got mouths and expressions, and I started using them to do silly little ideas that were too goofy for serious effort lol.
I still had the bigger eyes for serious things, but rapidly the line eye boatchibis were overtaking them. I just liked how they looked more than my attempts at serious stuff at the time.
Eventually the boatchibis started getting more normal proportions while keeping the line eyes, thus becoming the predecessor to my current style today, haha. You can see this in Mambolawyer.
The bigger eyes got phased out entirely, something Juan lampshades in Move Your Dead Bones when he says that he looks totally different from everyone else, like he was drawn three years later.
After boatchibis got incorporated into my general style, I didn't really draw them in their natural state very much anymore. I do have a few more recent ones here and there, although they're pretty elaborate compared to their more humble beginnings. They just read as a normal chibi to me now.
I use them mostly as a quick reference for a character. Amusingly they tend to have dot eyes instead of lines, haha.
It's kind of funny since some of my very earliest art from when I was a kid (little of which has survived) also had simple line eyes. Time is truly a flat circle...
