Ayo. I’m currently experiencing an existential crisis during a heavy rainstorm and the cat has me pinned so I can’t check the emergency weather alerts coming out of my phone. If I die, just accept it.
I’ve enjoyed having the opportunity to work with VTubers on character design, but have run into a frustrating wall trying to come up with one for myself. I’ve always liked to keep a drawing in the corner of the screen when I stream, so I thought it would be fun to have something a little more dynamic up there serving as an example.
This one gets a little heavy and it’s not a sketch dump, so feel free to ignore it since I’m going to put Actual Content in a separate post.
I kind of hate how often I’ve come back to the site, posted something with the intent to start using it more frequently, then fall down a memory hole and just kind of blank about it for literally months. So, so sorry, friends. 2021 has not been the best or worst year, it feels sort of like I’m just kind of getting my bearing again after you know. All that. (gestures at 2020)
To catch everyone up on my antics these days, there’s uh, not many of them. I recently did get a screen drawing tablet and I never realized how much easier it makes inking, which has always been my least favorite part of The Process. I’ve also been experimenting with colored lines and line-less styles a bit more but I have a ways to go before I’d say I was especially good at it. Actually I’ve been having something of a crisis of motivation and feeling like my work has plateaued lately that’s cut into my productivity, but New Toy is helping a bit.
Been dipping a foot into the Vtuber world a bit, I haven’t made or commissioned a model yet but it is something I’m interested in. I worry a bit about it coming off like a bandwagoning move, but since I like to keep a piece of my art onscreen most of the time, I thought it would be a neat extension of the idea to make an animated stand-in for myself. I’ve helped a couple of friends with character design, which was really a lot of fun. I like making up new characters as it is, and seeing my rough takes turned over to a pro illustrator is a lot cooler than I even expected. Sometimes I get touchy when people springboard off of my work, but in the case of XiaoJing’s finished models I felt more inspired to try and refine my style. My goal is to be able to draw and rig a proper Live2D for myself at some point, but it’s not a huge priority (as much as I keep pestering friends for feedback since I have a definite vibe I’m shooting for.)
Of course, on the other hand, making a laundry list of Known Flaws in my work I want to improve sometimes bogs me down a bit too when I look at my age, skill level, and what people around me can pull off. Clip Studio has a very handy 3D pose model tool which I worry about leaning on too hard since my mind’s eye’s anatomy tends to be pretty off from what a model wants to represent in the same poses. I’ve also been trying to improve my use of color. As mentioned before, I’ve been trying to mess with colored lineart again, to varying effect. and on a recent commission I tried for a more thorough rendering look instead of my usual cel shading since I thought it would work well with a cryptid themed piece.
It’s… hard to stay motivated sometimes, still. I hate to whine about it anymore, but the general lack of feedback my work tends to get kind of hurts my drive to keep at projects, even if they never really leave my heart or mind. Last week, a thread got me digging through old pictures trying to look for trends in improvement but it’s kind of all over the place instead of a satisfying curve of any kind. The most reliably ‘good’ swath I noted was probably 2016 following the official first daily sketch project, when I was still ‘warmed up’ and had a bunch of encouragement from new friends. Quality kind of dipped when I was drawing less frequently in the following years, probably bottoming out that year I took off from commissions and barely drew anything for myself since I was getting burnt out and depressed as shit. I think things are going better lately. Or at least I’m taking them better. For a while, I’ve had sort of a ‘nobody cares” mantra alternately comforting or decelerating me depending on the day. If something I’m working on turns out poorly- hey, nobody’s watching. If I put a couple evenings into a drawing I really enjoy and nobody sees it, oh. Nobody’s watching. I’m not fishing for compliments or attention here, forced or too-broad compliments tend to make me kind of paranoid, if anything. It’s my fault for being poor at promoting myself or my work or maintaining relationships. I guess I just always sort of hoped what I do would speak for itself and/or dumb luck would kick in.
I have positive things I should really be focusing on, I’ve had the chance to contribute to a Guardian Legend-like, designed a couple VTubers, handle art direction for RGL, and my Eishi/Dixie comics were doing alright until I got a perfectionist streak and refused to actually finish like three different works in progress. I’m looking to wrap up the ‘demo’ edition of Critical Heaven soon, and I may double back and finish Irrgarten since it was pretty far along. I would really like to bring back the girls and I had a Revolver reboot mostly planned out, but that’s kind of on the back burner for personal reasons. If anyone out there is still reading this stuff, don’t worry, I don’t think I ever could give up creating entirely. I’m just sorry there’s such a wait between updates these days. Take care of yourselves, and don’t be shy if there’s an artist or author or musician or anyone in your life who entertains and inspires you. It means more to them than you know, and even those that feel too big to approach are just people in the end.
OK I gotta put my foot down, RGL event stuff is kicking up again and I have a backlog of both regular commissions and “no-rush” favors, so I won’t be taking requests or commissions until I’m caught up. I appreciate the interest and don’t intend to leave people in the lurch who are already waiting on something, but I’ve been needing a break for a while. When I re-open my queue, I’ll have a clear cut price sheet posted to make things easier if you’re interested. I’m not sure exactly what kind of ETA we’re talking about here, but stay tuned!
I decided it would be fun to go back and look at the evolution of original characters I’ve been using for a while, show off how their design changed and why, and just generally hear myself talk. Hopefully, you find the process interesting as well, maybe it will even help some of you in some way. For this first installment, I ran a Twitter poll and was actually sort of surprised Critical Heaven’s Tomcat beat out my de facto mascot Eishi, but there’s a lot of stuff to say about her character and design over time.
You could almost say that Tomcat’s design began with an Arwing girl I drew ages ago during my daily sketch project. Of course, she would be a fox rather than a ‘cat,’ but the brown hair and white streak were already there to mimic Fox McCloud’s hair. It’s also pretty obvious I’ve been into the “anime girls as planes” thing for a very long time at this point. The design was actually designed to work best as a chibi with her toting a rifle shaped like the Arwing’s nose so the overall shape of the ‘sprite’ would look like a chunky version of the inspiration. I’d done plenty of designs like this for kicks in the past but didn’t have much idea what to do with them until I started getting into mobile games like Girls’ Frontline and something… clicked.
Earliest version of Tomcat was very… Anime American
Really, breaking down Tomcat will say a lot about the project overall since she was the first ‘plane girl’ I started working on. A-10 sprung to mind more or less fully formed, but Tomcat is more of a guideline for the rest of the conventional strike fighter class. The very first take on Cat was kind of a cynical “what would an Eastern-made video game do with a personification of an iconic US fighter,” so she’s a top heavy, blue-eyed blonde. Several early takes use a more drab jacket which was inspired by Tom Cruise’s Top Gun flight suit- but a flight suit isn’t really that fan servicey, so…
The twintails were actually probably about the most clever part since the F-14 *does* have two tails (thrust nozzles and rudders that is.) Her ribbons carrying Jolly Rogers was kind of intended to be a deal where if she was deco’d as other units their logo could replace it, but I went with those since they looked cool and it sort of doubles as a Macross ref. The aviators stay a constant through basically all versions.
TC. take two
I decided to change her to brown hair pretty early on for no particular reason other than a preference for redheads and brunettes. I wanted to give her cat ears in some form or another but shied away from giving her *actual* cat ears in favor of her headset including them. Another idea was putting small copies of the tail fins on her headset positioned like cat ears, but they don’t look much like a pair and having them sideways creating drag is basically the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. Looking back at the second draft I think I like having them smaller like this than what she currently has, especially since giving her kind of a pixie cut instead of twintails makes *anything* on her head stand out more. The armor isn’t more than hinted at but early on I was planning to have everyone wear their wings at hip level so I could do whatever when posing the upper body. The Jolly Rogers scarf is probably a little too on the nose GFL-ish but it looks cool, dammit.
The dawn of Cool Big Sis
As things went on, I decided on more of a “cool big sis” image for her and ditched the twintails and knotted undershirt. She looks so dependable in this stage! She also lost the Jolly Rogers imagery around here since I sort of started to get an inkling of saving some of the cooler themed paint jobs and stuff for variant costumes and the like and also wanted room to figure out an original look for the squadron. (In the end they all kind of just do their own thing, though…)
a more excitable kitty
The white streak found its way into Cat’s hair at some point (I honestly forgot it left other than her blonde phase!) I think it helps a bit to make her look more like an alley cat if her ‘coat’ isn’t all one color. I also made her a little younger looking since the fighter line she and her team are inspired by are collectively known as the “Teen Series” and I wanted her to be more in line with them in appearance. Her outfit became something more like a street racer’s and is supposed to be covered with patches and logos, even if I leave them out of a lot of sketches. I think sporty clothes suit her well, I love outfits that have a sexy side and a practical side to them. Since the other Heavens Squadron members have a dominant color, eventually I decided that Tomcat’s should be white but she has light greys with black and gold for emphasis here and there so it doesn’t look too sterile. She also gained a little cat bell alongside her dog tags about here.
The NO STEP warning and the number 6 patch on her bottom are some of my favorite parts of her outfit. Put together it kind of comes off as “Stay off my ass,” which fits her attitude nicely.
I think this is about where I was pretty satisfied with her basic look.
The girls’ armors in general have gone through a few changes, as mentioned above the original idea was to have the wings and engines around waist level but it sort of felt like they were just riding their armor instead of wearing it. The current general arrangement is for the engines and tail to rest at the small of the back with a ‘spine’ piece running the wings up to the shoulder area. In earlier takes the plane parts were spread out a bit more and Tomcat had a sort of unique arrangement where her intakes and wings were affixed to the shoulders themselves (the note about the shoulder clamps being padded and ‘comfy.’) Since Azur Lane and Girls’ Frontline were big inspirations, a lot of these designs sort of minimize the armor in favor of showing off the outfits underneath. In older sketches, the leg armor in particular is mostly limited to some straps and braces with big thigh panels and boots with landing wheels incorporated into them and the arms are basically bare. Alternative wing arrangements included them floating just outside the arms ‘anchored’ to upper arm braces and briefly, as forearm shields since wings both tend to house weapons and they’re just such nice big ‘shieldy’ looking bits. I was more or less approaching them from the angle of “how annoying would this be to pose with a toy?,” so a lot of the concepts were centered on how to leave the arms as free as possible.
Some of the broader ideas regarding what Sprites are and how they should look and act were gelling around here, which is when I began drawing them with light-up pupils instead of normal eyes. It’s an idea I’d sort of kicked around for another project but made more sense for a total non-human to have eyes that work differently than a person with nanomachines. Eishi’s have been missing for a long time so I’m considering retconning her into being a Sprite. The earliest concept when I sat down and went “I want fighter jets to turn into cute girls” was having them be ghosts or angels that emerged from the wrecks of downed aircraft, maybe even restless dead pilots wanting a second chance. Another idea was just plain androids, but a certain part of me just wasn’t satisfied with that. So, kind of cannibalizing an idea from a shmup concept, it was decided that they would be servants summoned from ancient relics- basically walking generators with a lot of power they weren’t able to actually use without human masters to give them devices to channel it through and/or permission to tap into it. This also provides a good excuse for them to have quirky personalities that a military/pseudo-military group would be willing to tolerate. So the final form of the Sprites ended up being ‘data beings’ of unclear origin brought out of black slabs from an old civilization that used them as some sort of archives.
Worth pointing out in the original blonde ‘Cat, it’s partially visible she’s wearing gauntlets with pylon attachments on them so she sort of got downgraded then gained them back later. The arm bracers the girls wear both function as deflector shields and hardpoints for weaponry. The leg reinforcements were originally intended to be specifically for carrier-based planes’ use but seeing as how all Sprites are small enough to work on one they basically all get some kind of leg armor.
Currently, Tomcat (and everyone else) are being steered in a more typical mecha musume-ish style but most of the outfits are being kept as ‘civvies.’ I had a few people wondering why I wasn’t drawing them more in the style of all the Guardian Legend stuff I used to post, and I didn’t have a particularly good answer seeing as how I love that stuff. The current iteration of Tomcat keeps a lot of her older design aspects but streamlined a bit to go with the form-fitting body armor. The skintight leotard parts are called Insulators- since the Sprites are effectively solidified data clusters, the most practical kind of armor they equip would be something that keeps their ‘signal’ from leaking out, right? Just don’t think too hard about how much skin some of the suits leave out. I just had to leave her her jacket though, it just doesn’t feel right without it there.
casual outfit for prowling the city
In short, I feel like the most drastic changes happened early on but once I settled on a personality I liked, her appearance settled in pretty solidly. She’s the sort who comes off as reckless, careless, maybe even a little dumb, but with sharp instincts and a lot of experience to back up her lack of taking things seriously. Tomcat is also infamously hard to keep track of in her off duty time, often wandering off into unexpected places looking for some kind of entertainment. At times, she’s been known to wander into enemy territory from time to time just to have lunch or mingle with off-duty rivals, generally to their annoyance. Despite that, she’s fiercely loyal to her squadron and sees them as her family.
I forgot to do a recap post for last month, though it wasn’t an especially productive one. I got a mostly finished Tabletop Sim version of Critical Heaven put together for testing, then proceeded to not do much testing. I had a few requests to use a hex map, which I honestly do like parts of but hope that the turning restriction doesn’t trip the pace of the game up. I’ve yet to put skills to the Tactics Cards, but the individual girls’ skills are there to test and once I’m satisfied with that I’ll slap that last layer of complexity on top of it all and hope it doesn’t break.
My goal is basically to keep the game fast paced and simple, but ideally with enough meat there for people to have fun with team compositions and deck builds. As with Irrgarten (god, remember that? I should finish that too), I’m doing the tabletop approach so I can put something out there while I struggle to absorb rudimentary coding lessons. That and I like the idea of a mecha musume tactics game with ‘feelies’ and I swear I don’t mean that in a bad way. (Ideally it would be cool to have miniatures, even/especially customizable ones for people to personalize squadrons with.) I plan on adding some more static pages to the site as more game stuff is presentable, so keep an eye out for that.
To recap, Critical Heaven is a short-session strategy battle game featuring Sprites, cute and powerful beings attached to AirFrames who battle for air superiority and claim to the land and resources below it. It’s inspired by the art trends of humanizing machines and programs as well as some of the weird, nichey tactical RPGs I’ve enjoyed. (Yggdra Union and Rondo of Swords were particularly big influences in how to work ‘action’ and ‘flow’ into a turn based battle.)
Since my posting’s gotten so erratic as to distrupt the monthly recap format, I’m just going to batch upload some of my recent works, stopping short of the Slayers Artober I’m participating in since that should be enough images to be a thing in its own right.
Eishi has a new sweater and now we have to hear about it
