now that the voting candidates are out i can finally post my dual override boss submission to a website with real people on it <3 cathode woman is a data preservationist and oldass movie enthusiast, who makes a surprisingly formidable opponent thanks to the 20th-century tech integrated into her body! seriously cathode ray tubes are insane
click for better text readability, dashboard will probably eat this pretty badly. reblogs and comments are appreciated!
somehow i've been in the deltarune mines since day one and haven't drawn a single cool picture about it until now ????
[transparent art + misc. yapping under the cut. reblogs and/or comments are appreciated!]
my new year's resolution is to draw more nice coloured stuff for fun and for myself, so i decided last night to clean up this kris scribble from a week or two ago. [been watching a lot of deltarune theory/analysis stuff while i shiny hunt, i think that combination clicked something into place for me because kris has looked something like this in my head for years but this was the first time i got them onto paper in a way that felt right.] from there i just kinda slapped stuff on the canvas without much planning until i liked what i was looking at. i've lost pieces before to overthinking the composition until i wasn't having fun anymore, so it was definitely a good move to just make shit up without worrying about it so much
and i did really enjoy drawing this, and i like what i ended up making! so i think the drawing for fun thing is going well so far. thanks kris.
i can't remember the last time i public posted a wip and i DEFINITELY shouldn't be posting this one since it's a gift for a friend lol [hence the big ugly censor brick] but i just could not help myself given the circumstances. it's a good fucking day to be a mega man fan
been rewatching a lot of animation vs. lately and it's really put me in a creative mood - since i'm still stuck in digital art burnout i tried physically making something and i've been having a lot of fun :] the pattern i used was made by @sammy8d257, with some hack job modifications i added to make them a bit taller!
individual shots and some yammering about the process are under the cut; i'm trying to kill my perfectionism so this one's pretty rambly and disorganised compared to my usual artblog posts. slow internet havers and mobile users beware!
yellow was the first i made, green was the last, and you can really see the difference in how neatly put together they are ;v; while i'm a little tempted to remake yellow i'm firmly setting that idea aside for now, perfect is the enemy of fun and everything. besides i've already got the fabric and plans for purple and king and i wanna make them before i get hung up on fixing my first couple attempts >:| !!
everything here is hand stitched! i absolutely do not recommend this lol, i'm just not good enough with our busted ass old sewing machine to do anything on such a small scale. i also never figured out how to pull the stitching between the head and body tight enough to really visually separate them so i ended up making the 'necks' by winding string around the outside and pulling it tight, which did very much feel like i was strangling them lmao but it got the job done. they're all made out of coloured fleece, with exceptions for some of the accessories: yellow's glasses are painted wire, green's sunglasses are mostly cardboard and tsc's photoshop brush is supported by it, and blue's hat is a knit fabric
i think second is my favourite :] they were probably the hardest to make, between their head being a pain in the ass to turn inside out and their scarf taking forever to sew together by hand, but i'm really happy with the result! helps that they're one of my favourite characters too, only beaten by blue and king. the photo of them drawing pictures has a very jpeggy sneak peek at some of my ava doodles [and also the prince of all cosmos because i was playing a shitload of we love katamari at the time], but i'd really like to share my stick figure designs properly ;v; i think i just have to get my bearings in the fan space first! you guys are all younger than hell and it's scaring me lmao
thank y'all for reading all of whatever this is [world's worst artist statement, i guess?], and thank you again to @sammy8d257 for making these little guys possible with the super accessible pattern and instructions!
i also need a new pinned post and to take down my current commission post and replace it with a better one and to redo my blog theme for out-of-dash viewing because the one i made like 4 years ago looks like 𝓼𝓱𝓲𝓽 but whatever man i'll do it later
did up a nice proper refsheet for drum! kind of for artfight, mostly because it's just nice to have on hand for personal reference. behold her tpose <3
the original doodle is from about a month ago! thought i'd clean it up and work in the better understanding of his shapes i have now that i've drawn him an embarrassing number of times
bit different from my usual creative stuff, but i made a custom remix for the first time since before heaven studio was a thing! [tumblr hates links but the description of the youtube video includes a download, if you want to play it for yourself!]
the fullsize thumbnail art and the rating endcards i slapped together are all under the readmore :]
working my way through the long list of robot masters who i really love but have never properly drawn. one billion transgender robots on planet earth o7
experimenting with some stuff i haven't tried much before, mainly line weight variance and halftones/palette restrictions. there are only 8 colours in this piece!
some helmetless blues redoodles because i’ve been thinking about my boy…. i like to think that he’s a lot more expressive under the helmet than he’d like you to believe
the mega man autism came back so i've been cooking a new guy to add to my lineup of mmocs :] created by dr. astil to aid in search and rescue operations, glow man provides light, heat, supplies, and a friendly face in dangerous places and dire circumstances. and also he is a lava lamp
rewatched the sonic ova a few months ago. since then i've thought a bit too hard about the only loosely explained way that hyper metal sonic was created, been irreversibly changed by the idea of a sonic who wakes up in a body that isn't his and discovers that all his memories and friendships and adventures belong to someone else now, rekindled my obsession with the various metal sonics of pre-reboot archie, and finally learned how to care about sonic heroes
photon is basically every version of metal sonic ever, a few of the charmingly edgy aus i wrote when i was 11, and a few sonic cd fan theories all thrown in a blender and kicked down a flight of stairs, and i'm kind of obsessed with him. really, REALLY long infodump and some supplementary scribbles under the cut
WELCOME TO THE PHOTON ZONE
a little after sa2, eggman lures sonic into some trap that pins him down long enough for an electronic copy to be made of his brain. sonic trashes the place and escapes with only a mild headache and a bruised ego, but all the data eggman scraped is intact. as he's creating neo metal sonic, eggman uploads this digital ghost of sonic into him, with the intention to upgrade from having a fancy bootleg to a truly 'perfect' answer to sonic, who can simulate his entire psyche in real time and know everything he's going to do before he does it
[eggman would love to steal a hedgehog, actually]
unfortunately for eggman, his latest copy is too perfect, and sonic's indomitable will and sense of self easily overpowers any feeble attempts the rest of neo metal sonic's programming makes to keep him in line. pretty much the moment he's booted up, he books it outta there as fast as possible to go find his friends and fix things. with all of sonic's memories embedded in him, the thought that he isn't the real thing doesn't even cross metal's mind - as far as he knows, he made an embarrassing blunder in a dingy old egg base, had something done to his brain, and then woke up miles away in a robot body that eggman must have stuffed him into somehow. he just has to find tails and amy and knuckles and the rest, make sure he didn't hurt any of them during that mysterious gap in his memory, and slap together a plan to get his body back and shove eggman into a puddle. no sweat!
so naturally, it's a bit hurtful when none of his friends believe for a second that he's who he says he is. and it's a LOT hurtful when the real sonic shows up, in the body that's SUPPOSED to be his, and metal suddenly has no idea who or what he is
even though it's not enough to override the sonic personality, eggman's programming is still twisting metal's thoughts. an angry killer robot is an effective killer robot, so any negative emotion or violent impulse is forced to the front of his mind. metal is angry at eggman for doing this to him, and at his friends for not trusting him, and at sonic for existing in the body and life that belong to him, and all of this gets mixed in with the existential despair and knee-jerk denial of what's happening to him and then magnified tenfold. a version of the sonic heroes storyline takes place as metal's mental state worsens exponentially, and he begins to lash out more and more violently at everyone and everything around him in increasingly desperate attempts to prove [mostly to himself] that this other sonic is a fake.
this culminates in the metal overlord battle, where metal [who's escalated from 'prove himself superior to sonic' to 'defeat sonic and force him to admit the truth' to 'literally just kill him, since he's obviously a hyper realistic android sent by eggman or whatever and not a real thing that can feel pain and die'] harnesses the chaos emeralds in a last-ditch effort to prove his strength and reduce the 'fake' sonic to ashes - only for his body to twist and mutate into something so utterly, viscerally Wrong that the fear and confusion cause what's left of sonic in him to just shut down from distress, finally leaving only the mindless killing machine eggman set out to make in the first place and forcing super sonic to step in and kick metal overlord's ass. defeated by the power of friendship, depowered, and severely damaged, metal finally accepts and admits that he isn't the real sonic and probably never was, and doesn't fight it when his systems fail and he loses consciousness
contrary to what his anger had him believe, though, metal's [former?] friends did see that he was suffering and needed answers, and so sonic and tails take him back to the workshop in mystic ruins to shed some light on the whole situation. when tails finds a disturbingly perfect resemblance to an organic brain in the program map, everything finally clicks - what that weird Beam Of Give You Headache sonic got hit by a couple months ago was, how eggman made a metal sonic that knew so much about the real thing's life, why this metal seemed less mechanically violent and more genuinely emotionally distressed. with eggman's loyalty programming scrubbed from his system, metal wakes back up confused and upset but much more 'himself', and even manages a few natural-feeling responses as tails explains what he found and apologises over and over for not being able to help sooner.
he still doesn't like sonic.
metal leaves pretty much as soon as he's in working condition. even when sonic isn't there reminding him that he isn't himself anymore, he can't stand being around a tails who isn't his brother. he takes to wandering the world directionlessly, trying to figure out who he is now and find a place in a world that doesn't remember him. he's not sonic anymore, and it'd be easier to list the things he doesn't hate about being called 'metal sonic' or just metal, so after a while he settles on introducing himself as 'photon' - another intangible fast thing, like sound, but comfortably distant from his old name. [it's also a stupendously petty means of one-upping sonic, light being faster than sound and everything. drama queen.]
the timeline gets way fuzzier after all this overdetailed nonsense, but things do get better for photon. he has an identity now, and it's fragile and cobbled together and still missing pieces, but it belongs to him and nobody else. he strikes up a few odd but sincere friendships - he hangs out with big when he needs a calm and comforting presence, and has a fierce friendly rivalry with shadow underpinned by their quietly shared experience of not knowing whether to trust their own memory, and much later down the line he bonds with belle over the mundane frustrations of being a robot [and, privately, because she's the best fit so far for the tails-shaped hole in his heart]. he keeps up the drifter lifestyle, making new memories to replace painful old ones, finding ways to use his robot abilities for fun or to help people rather than purely as tools of destruction. it's not perfect for photon, he's still deeply bitter and existentially lonely and missing a sense of purpose, but it's Better, and that counts for something
photon is like some of the earlier [western] depictions of sonic in personality - rougher around the edges, more sarcastic and much less sincere, often brushing up against the line between playfully teasing and just being a bully. whereas sonic has grown into the generally kinder and more patient person he is these days thanks to the friends he's made and the adventures he's had, photon split off from him when that character development was just barely starting, and the trauma from his loss of identity made him regress instead of moving forward. he's still a kind person at heart, but that period of artificially inflated anger and despair has left its mark on how he handles his emotions, even if the programming that first caused it is long gone.
powers-wise, photon is pretty much identical to neo metal sonic, albeit with some limitations. he's as fast and strong as the real thing, can shapeshift or use chaos control if he's got an emerald with him, and with all 7 can take on a super form - though since the metal overlord incident, he's refused to try. [i'm leaving it open whether metal overlord is his innate super transformation now or if it was caused by him tapping into the negative energy of the chaos emeralds rather than sonic's usual positive, since both are really fun ideas. either way, becoming metal overlord was way too traumatic for photon to have any interest in trying again for now.]
he can still copy the biodata of living beings that he comes into contact with, but most of his storage space is taken up by the entire organic brain being simulated in realtime, which he's definitely not willing to modify or delete, so he's effectively limited to only the most recent two or three powers he's copied. he shapeshifts a little to reflect the data he's pulling from, mostly because it's fun to imagine what it'd look like. also because i'm a mega man guy. once again it all comes back to worlds collide being peak fiction
this concludes THE PHOTON ZONE, if only because this has been in my drafts for 3 days and i just want to make my damn post already. if the 1400 word infodump didn't make it clear i am VERY obsessed with my sad little metal sonic amalgam lmao. all this and i still had to cut a ton of details to prevent this infodump from being do you love the colour of the photon, so if my unhinged ramblings have convinced you to care about him even a fraction as much as i do i'd be thrilled to answer any followup questions here or on my main!!!!
