Works of heART

21+. Professional art blog, home of my polished work, including fanart that isn't in my portfolio! Check out my website in the pinned post for a better catalogue of my work! Anonymous by choice.

[thekeytomyh-art]

Works of Heart

The art page and portfolio for LoverboyHartley, a cartoonist and character designer passionate about childhood fun living in all of his work

LoverboyHartley is a Portland-based artist specializing in visual development and character design. He prides himself on creating "works of heart", guided by passion and excitement for crafting characters and always looking to capture childlike wonder, whimsy and fun in every piece he makes.

[thekeytomyh-art]

Introducing Rasen! He’s my Zelda sona, basically. Rasen has actually existed since 2021 but he’s always been unwieldy with being drawn and now five years after his conception I finally did the agonizing deed and spent literal days wrestling with his design so he could be around for ArtFight. It isn’t a full turnaround either, as I compromised creating the reference because he was just SUCH a headache. I didn’t want to obsess over my usual standards, I just needed it done. In the future I plan to add a side profile!

He’s also my vehicle for self shipping with the Happy Mask Salesman because that’s my brand of whimsy, heheee. The Terrible Fate animation awakened something in me when I saw how gorgeous he looked.

I’ve always loved the Deku Scrubs and needed a Deku OC, they were really kinda left to the wayside in the franchise. I’m happy Echoes of Wisdom brought them back! But I’d love to see them return to 3D Zelda someday. I really want to see a close look at their society in the same way Majora’s Mask did, and really define them as a race. MM is all we have to go on now and due to the weird way Termina exists I’m not even sure what we see of the Deku can be classified as canon! Anyway, information about this scrub is under the cut. He’s based on a weeping willow, by the way! There was a giant one in my childhood home’s backyard I’d loved playing under, so I feel very connected to them.

Rasen is a gentle soul with a very mellow, amicable personality. He’s not one to make waves and often changes himself to be perfectly tolerable to everyone. He lives in a small Deku village hidden within the depths of the woods beyond where the Kokiri dwell and was raised to be a helpful gentleman. And he does enjoy being helpful, and likes helping people, but there’s always a part of him that dares to dream, and it most often comes out either when he’s completely alone, or with the village children.

He’s often left in charge of the sprouts due to his excessive helpfulness (if that’s the right way to put it) and mellow demeanor, but when he’s allowed to indulge the children’s imaginations, he loves creating wild stories and adventures for them to go on. Children love his tales and often beg him to perform for them, and he often creates props for his stories to make them even more exciting, such as capes, swords and masks. Playing into the imagination of the little ones is the one time he can indulge his wild daydreams of adventure before he goes back to being calm and respectable. He loves the moments where he can be loud, theatrical and dramatic, dreaming beyond his station, because it’s acceptable when it’s only a performance for the sprouts.

In my interpretation of them, Deku scrubs rarely leave their forests and their relationships with other races are shaky at best, as they aren’t often seen as much more than monster adjacent, with the exception of business scrubs. So dreaming beyond the forest privately is really all Rasen can do. But in the year or so leading up to the events of Ocarina of Time, the forest becomes agitated and the village can’t maintain its natural production of supplies, so the younger, fitter scrubs have to go out trying to do business with other races to get the supplies they need. It’s both a nightmare and a dream come true when Rasen is sent out, because in all honesty he’s hesitant to step out of his bubble and grew quite complacent in the idea that his dreams would just stay dreams. But he does hesitantly go to Castle Town, where he meets a mysterious salesman who shares in his wonder, his love for dreaming, and his joy found in bringing happiness to others… with masks.

I’ll leave it there but if you ever want to ask me anything about him I’d be delighted!

[thekeytomyh-art]

It’s my third artfight this year! I do one attack a day and try to always revenge though with how many more mutuals I’ve gotten since entering the furry fandom, I’m not sure if I can keep the guaranteed revenges coming… but who knows! Come follow me!

[thekeytomyh-art]

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

If you’re like me and have an identity with lots of sub-labels/flags, it can be a bit fun to take a bunch of your sonas and have them throw their own pride parade with all your flags! This is by no means all of my OCs, it’s not even all of my sonas, but it’s a variety of sonas!

This particular piece has been in the works since the start of the month and has only been finished just now. It was very ambitious for me, someone who normally focuses on a single character and design within an illustration. There were lots of sleepless nights and trial and error that made this piece happen.

Now, regarding pride month. With our rights in more jeopardy than they’ve been in many years, please remember to keep protesting and fighting, but between that, don’t forget to celebrate either. Queer joy, especially trans joy, is protest too. We are still here, we are still queer, and we deserve lives that extend beyond the constant struggle to keep our rights. Never stop fighting, but never stop celebrating either. For those of us who can be out and proud, be as out and as proud as you can be, normalize who we are and what we live for, and help create a world that will one day be safe for our queer siblings who cannot be out right now to one day be as loud and proud as the rest of us. Do not forget your queer joy or your queer outrage!

As a trans man, I never expected to last long. My parents made it clear to me when I began my transition that I was opting into life on hard mode. Maybe they were right, it is harder, but it’s infinitely more fulfilling than pretending to be someone I’m not. And every bit of joy, every triumph I feel, feels like protest in a world that wants me dead. I’ve graduated high school, I’ve graduated college, I live on my own, these were all things a young, barely-out version of myself couldn’t even visualize. My survival and my thriving is my protest every day. Look at me, fascists, I’m still alive and I’m happy. I will stay happy. And I will stay proud.

[thekeytomyh-art]

I’m not normally one for sketchbook pages as I struggle filling out an entire page, but with the art rut I’ve been in I’m trying to develop better practices. Hence a page of Marios <3

I slept on Mario as a character when I was a kid, was much more interested in the rest of the cast who had more outwardly going on but now that I’m older I love Mario so much more. He’s just such a good and sweet fella with so much yippee and yahoo in his heart <3

[thekeytomyh-art]

Introducing my truesona (as a guy who already has a fursona), Beauregard Bones! You can just call him Beau, though.

As a fursona haver I do identify a lot more with the species of my main sona—a penguin—but the character itself of my main fursona is meant to be just one aspect of me, my love of clowning and being social, making people smile! Beau is all of me, the good, the bad and the ugly. I love my dinosaur and I hope you do too! I’d talk about him more but that’s literally just talking about myself and I’d rather not for anonymity’s sake. But feel free to ask questions about him and I can decide if I’m comfortable enough asking! He probably won’t be seen nearly as much as my main fursona, the outgoing and energetic Jester, but he’s always around!

…did I mention I’m open for furry commissions? ;)

[thekeytomyh-art]

I normally don’t post more idle doodles, but this chihuahua I drew really amused me for some reason.

[thekeytomyh-art]

Throughout today and yesterday I studied the design of one of my favorite game franchise’s most popular characters, Duna Nichs, to give her the best redesign I could!

I love Duna and her design is nice, but she’s canonically fourteen and her original design… doesn’t depict that. It’s a bit telling that the render of her I put in the redesign image is honestly the closest she’s looked to fourteen across the series.

Many of the characters I draw are adults and I don’t have to think much about consciously making a character look younger so this was a test to see how I could do it! I think I did a pretty good job but let me know what you think!

Below the cut is my design notes and pieces of my process!

Firstly, I wanted to make Duna based on a specific dinosaur. I like the fanmade dinaurian character concepts that are based off of real world dinosaurs so I looked for something that would fit her. Since her vivosaur form has the water type, I looked at aquatic or semi aquatic dinosaurs. Originally I was going to go with spinosaurus, but she is described in her vivosaur form’s moves as being elegant, graceful, and she is classed as a small vivosaur using the body base of many of the more delicate low defense support vivosaurs, so I wanted to find a sleeker dinosaur as opposed to the large, bulky spinosaurus. I landed on the nothosaurus seen below!

I thought it suited her, and I didn’t want to choose a plesiosaur as I still wanted my Duna to be able to stand on land in her vivosaur form. Though since the nothosaurus has a pretty streamlined body without too many notable features or projections, the inspiration isn’t very visible in her normal form beyond her having webbed hands/feet, long interlocking teeth, and an extra long and thin tail.

Then there was the question of her markings… I saw some people claiming the dark blue markings on dinaurians were clothes, but that doesn’t make much sense to me as there’s no point in those dark blue areas that give the impression of something like clothes hanging off the body. The only dinaurian who wears clothes is Dynal, who has a different shade of blue to his robe, and you can see in this official art underneath his robe his body still has that blue shade.

This was all important to me because it determined if my dinaurians as a whole were going to have clothes! But it really seemed like they weren’t clothes because of Dynal’s design, so I opted without. If it turns out I’m wrong I’ll give all the dinaurians clothes! I like to think they don’t see it as necessary due to their scales but they enjoy accessorizing, however much they accessorize depends on the individual but I imagine Duna and Raptin specifically probably don’t accessorize much since they’re basically soldiers, so they probably prefer things to be “practical”.

I altered the shades of blue of her “main” skin tone and the secondary marking blue too, both leaning more purple to compliment her pink. The pink felt like a very important part of the design and was one of the things I really wanted to preserve! I also added these faded stripes along her back, because I was thinking of alligators which have similar striped backs, but only when they’re young, and they fade into adulthood, again showing her age. I also migrated a lot of the darker blue to her back, to give her a sort of countershading that a lot of aquatic animals have. Though I kept the dark blue legs as that feels like a very iconic trait for the dinaurian characters. Any future redesigns (Raptin is a very messy design I would definitely like to alter…) will also keep this feature because I love it!

The dinaurian body plan I kept mainly the same, beyond her special features to the dinosaur she’s inspired by, I also gave her a nose because her face seemed a bit empty without it. I altered her hair, looking at styles popular in the late 2000s for teenage girls and liked the sort of rebellious look the one I chose gave her. I know she’s an alien and probably wouldn’t be interested in styling her hair with the trends but I like to imagine she did it to fit in better on earth and ended up liking the style.

The dinaurians also are shown to carry a lot of tech on them so I just incorporated all of that into the design, including their ray guns, transmission devices and holo-disguise devices. I made all the glowing parts of them match the eyes of the tech’s wearer to show they’re linked to that specific user, meaning they can basically use their tech with their minds like it’s an extension of their bodies.

And… that’s all! I think I’ll do Raptin next… eventually. This was a very good exercise for drawing younger characters and actually making an effort to make them look younger. As well as breaking down these designs and figuring what is important to stay and what can go!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be picking my DS back up and playing again! :)

[thekeytomyh-art]

I normally save my dragon puppet related content for my youtube (I know, not a dragon, it’s fanart, but it’s using a dragon puppet format so that counts!) but I thought I’d post this silly thing here since I still need to film Pest’s grand reveal on Youtube and don’t plan on uploading this to the youtube channel anyway. I think I’m getting better at this dragon puppet thing and I had to make yet another ode to one of my favorite video game creatures.

I won’t be able to do art for a while now once I get my surgery so creating this guy is my last hurrah for a while.

[thekeytomyh-art]

Yesterday, I had myself a dream come true experience and got to go on my first ever horseback ride. I was left feeling so inspired I finally picked up drawing horses again after a much needed post thesis hiatus and drew the horse I rode.

Her name was Jet, she was a suffolk punch mare with some quarter horse in her too, I think predominantly suffolk punch though? She was a treat to ride even if I fell off once. I’d love to do it again if I ever have the money.

[thekeytomyh-art]

I’ve gotten way too many ideas hatching about MLP. I’m thinking of basically making an entire AU! I might make little overview sheets for various species, maybe talk about lore a bit… I stopped watching the show at season 6, so I’m thinking I’m just going to rewrite the lore a bit post season 5. The show does kinda get… unsettlingly colonialist in its last few seasons? And there’s some stuff I wanna rewrite, both things I didn’t like, and things I do like but want to expand on more. Might make this into a whole AU that has its own proper tag on the blog if people are interested.

[thekeytomyh-art]

MLP G4 redesigns: part 2–the CMC!

The mane six redesigns

This is the next part of my MLP redesign series and the last bit I did while working together with my old roommate @nofacednerd on these! Her and I did Applebloom and Sweetie Belle together by our pass-the-IPad-back-and-forth method and I later did Scootaloo on my own. And I can also talk about the thoughts behind the redesigns because I remember the thought process for these as opposed to the mane six.

Design info under the cut, if you’re curious!

So their cutie marks—altogether the goal was to keep them similar so they still looked united, but neither of us were too happy with the official designs. I think one of our main gripes was that they’re very small, even on already small characters, and we wanted to focus more on the parts of the cutie mark unique to each of the girls rather than the common theme that unites them. So the icon inside the shield motif mainly just got bigger, breaking the border occasionally.

Sweetie Belle

She was the first of the CMC we redesigned after finishing the mane six and I think we had the idea to give each of them their own unique aesthetic/style which I admittedly struggled to maintain in Scootaloo. Sweetie Belle was a preppy vibe we wanted to go for. Also, since her sister is a fashionista, we decided to give her more accessories since Rarity, especially our blinged-out version of her, would definitely want her little sister to always look her best. Nofacednerd really did a beautiful job on her hair, both around her hooves (since we wanted the traditional unicorn look) and her actual hair with all its swirls. We also added the little ribbon around the neck which matches her older sister’s own neck ribbon.

Applebloom

Applebloom of course was more of a quaint country girl aesthetic. I saw a design for her with pigtails by an artist I unfortunately can’t remember and I thought it fit her perfectly. Since her hair was already done up with little bows we also decided to move her signature bow back to her tail. Since our Applejack was darker, we darkened Applebloom up too and gave her little spots and markings to match her sister. Also a bandanna, because every little country pony looks cute with a bandanna! And since our Applejack is a draft horse we also made Applebloom much stockier and fluffier around the hooves too, I imagine all the apples are draft/work horse adjacent.

Scootaloo

My first one done all by my lonesome! I chose a more punk aesthetic for Scootaloo though it’s very, very light. I wanted everything on Scootaloo to have a very DIY look to him since in this redesign universe his neglectful parents just don’t exist at all, so he does all his stylings himself to mixed results. She shaved the mane on the back of her head/neck and also dyed a rainbow streak in her mane to emulate Rainbow Dash. I think their ear is chipped for the same reason, they tried to pierce it themselves and that didn’t go so well. She’s got a few band-aids from the numerous scooter scrapes she gets into, and for a bit more visual interest I added some faint light bands on her legs kind of like how some mustangs have tiger stripes around their legs. I think they’ll grow into them and they’ll become more visible. It also wasn’t intentional, just some posing, but he kind of came out looking chubbier and I kind of like the look!

Can’t wait to show you guys the princesses! There’s one design in there that nofacednerd and I did do together (for Twilight in her final princess form) and I just finished Celestia and am very thrilled with how she came out!

[thekeytomyh-art]

Redesigns are some of my favorite things ever! I love exploring the things that make the original designs and then examining my own interpretation of them, giving a character a completely new look. It’s such a fun exercise and if you haven’t done character redesigns I highly recommend it! So when me and my old roommate @nofacednerd were living together we decided to work together as a little for-fun project to redesign MLP characters since we were both fans of the show. Our process was passing my tablet back and forth, adding what we wanted and talking about what we liked until we had a finished design. The two of us together did the mane 6 and 2/3 of the cutie mark crusaders. While on my job hunt I picked up the redesigning game again and I want to share them with you all! These ones were created with my friend nofacednerd along with two of the CMC, and everything beyond them will be my own. But for now, here’s our redesigns of the mane 6 in order of creation!

And by the way everyone praise my dear sweet cheese good times boy nofacednerd for her work here because it was AMAZING!! Especially the way she did the manes and tails and the accessories too! I learned so much about drawing hair from her in just doing this project alone.

[thekeytomyh-art]

Happy hatchday Adi!!! It’s so crazy the day I picked up the game again after a few months of not playing I found out his birthday was the literal next day. So hooray, happy hatchday to Adi, here’s a celebration from my Paleofolksona Burrnie the Cryolophosaurus! (Maybe the pair of them have a bit of a little crush on each other…) And congrats to Ambertail for making such a lovely game, and being only a few months out from the release anniversary too! Amber Isle is definitely a favorite indie game of mine and I admire the studio so much.

I relate to Adi a lot as a young twenty something going out into the working world, trying to find my place and what I’m meant to do while being this over enthusiastic people pleaser. He’s such a treat to get to hang out with. I want that plush of him so bad, when I have the money to spare it’s mine…

EDIT: Woops oh no I accidentally put the year instead of the day on the drawing!! Big yikes from me I will fix soon.

[thekeytomyh-art]

Works of Heart

The art page and portfolio for LoverboyHartley, a cartoonist and character designer passionate about childhood fun living in all of his work

HIP, HIP HOORAY! My website is live today! Here's to one giant step in my art career!

[thekeytomyh-art]

Woops, I teased the WIP of this ages ago and just... never posted it. So here it is! I'm really proud of it, especially since the Reaper is a departure from cartoonishness that I'm used to.

I'm aware this Reaper isn't even close to size accurate, this was for a school project and I wanted to push contrasting sizes. So just imagine it's an... alpha Reaper or something.

I've been really getting back into Subnautica and it's been responsible for a lot of my wasting away as of late while I build my big Reaper research base. Watching for that Yootooz plush drop like a hawk 👀

[thekeytomyh-art]

Created the new background for the website I’m working on! I’m really pleased with how it turned out. Hartley hasn’t been drawn by me in a while and it was nice to get back to him. I still have plenty of assets to keep working on, and I hope to be posting them here when I’m done!