Banter – Page 9 – THIRD HALF//

Miscellanous posts, shop talk.

Welcome To Fantastic Year 2020

January 22, 2020 3/2 No Comments

I’ve been battling through some pretty severe funks over the course of the past few years, and began to hit ‘depressed to the point of non-functionality’ fairly frequently in the past two particularly. In an effort to combat this, I’ve started a second Sketch-A-Day exercise I call SAD-II which conveniently puts the word SAD up there in a way that looks professional and is attached to something fun.

As per last time, I don’t have any hard goals beyond drawing or creating one Thing every day. (Technically, writing this post counts, but I’m still going to do an actual drawing later tonight.) But should I do some crafting or model building or something, I may substitute some shots of the product. I do have a list of things I would like to focus on and improve, in particular I’d like to get better at pinup-worth character art for a game I’m working on. Many of the original characters I’ll be sharing as part of this are related to that of course. I’d also like to improve my backgrounds and overall finesse inking as I go along.

I sort of dragged my feet cross posting the dailies here since 1) Twitter is easier if lacking in options and limited to 4 pics max and 2) I keep holding my breath that I’ll do a proper site revamp but that didn’t happen when the year turned over, so I’m not using that as a deadline! I’ll be batch posting for now and making smaller more frequent posts after catching up here.

Started with an Eishi, will attempt a redraw on Dec. 31
UMP-45 as Lina Inverse
Rough sketches of how Tomcat’s AirFrame works
Dassault Mirage III
Captain Novolin for the NEXT GEN of over a decade ago
Su-27 Flanker
F-15 Eagle
Eishi Leap
Lina Inverse
F-117 Nighthawk
Misc. Figure drawimgs
Tohru, Dragon Maid
Red Baron
A kind of “meh” night
F/A-18 Hornet, take 1
Take 2
Hornet details, sort of
Eagle and Hornet
Ame-Rider
F-4 Phantom/Wild Weasel
UMP9 is here! Everyone, we’re family now!
A-10 Thunderbolt II

Slayers Week 2 Masterpost

July 27, 2019 3/2 No Comments

I sort of intended to be back before the second Slayers Week happened, but let’s be honest, new content here is a surprise these days anyway! So, let’s share.

Day One- Filia Ul Copt: I basically hadn’t touched a pen in between the two weeks so this one feels pretty rough to me, but people seemed to like it for its ‘atmosphere,’ so I’m a bit happy with that. I could go on a pretty long tear about my thoughts on Filia and Slayers Try, but I’ll spare you. Also I had to think long and hard as to whether her ears were actually pointed or that as some kind of accepted fanart rule.

Day 2- Villains: Since the prompts in Slayers Week tend to have a lot of variety, I try to pick characters outside the obvious ones as subjects and came to realize Jillas is actually one of my favorite characters in Try. He plays a good goofball minion, but underneath it turns out to be very sympathetic and mostly just wants the best for his Boss for saving him and showing him some rudimentary kindness., which ultimately leads him to joining up with the good guys, He’s even alluded to in Revolution since Seyruun’s palace wall is defended by a battery of “Jillas Cannons.” I like to think he’s doing well for himself and isn’t just polishing pottery forever.

Day 3- Amelia wil Tesla Seyruun: Amelia is a character a lot of people (me included) just found annoying when they were introduced but she grew on me a lot, especially once I kind of ‘got’ what she was sort of a play on. I’m not super happy with this one because I rushed and I think it shows in the proportions. (The original sketch had a really small chest, then I think I overcompensated in the other direction- her breasts should *probably* overlap the arms a bit even if she’s squeezing inwards.) The lack of background is probably also a giveaway. I did a small variant to sort of make up for it-

Day 4- Wardrobe Malfunction: The prompt name first had me thinking of some way to pull off cheeky sfw nudity, but reading closer it was aimed more at alternate costumes . The idea is Lina caught someone peeping in the womens’ bath and threw on the wrong outfit in a hurry to give chase. The colors came out a little weird since I tried using a color blending layer for night instead of picking actual night colors directly, but there’s a couple little details I like (Amelia’s top hanging loose off of Lina, Amelia short of breath from the top being too tight.) Originally I was going to draw Amelia in a tokusatsu costume but thought “I really shouldn’t draw the same character again right after their spotlight.” Then I did it anyway.

Day 5- Zelgadis Greywords: I liked this pose a lot and it didn’t get much traction/activity from the event. >_> I probably should have taken the time to blend it a bit to make the fabric portions look softer.

Day 6- Xellos: Confession: I’m not really the biggest fan of the guy. I think it was a case of fandom hype dampening my enthusiasm mostly though, since he doesn’t exactly get on my nerves directly in the series itself. I sort of based this on the “Dragon Cuisine” episode where he just kind of lounges in a tree watching everyone make idiots of themselves. Also, the apple makes him look more… snake-like.

Day 7- Naga the Serpent: I’d never really seen anyone try to draw Naga in her youth before running away, so I decided to go for that angle. There’s only so many ways to pose a leather bikini lady after all. Amelia and Phil wound up in here too.

All in all, it was a pretty good time, but I’m a little disappointed in myself for not managing my time better and either rushing or running late for most of it. I’ve been kind of trying to learn the finer points of blending and such in FireAlpaca since I haven’t been able to use MyPaint like I was before.

Slayers Week Masterpost

June 23, 2019 3/2 No Comments

Another Slayers Week draws to a close on the Tumblrsphere and it was fun participating as usual. I was especially excited that my cross posts to Twitter managed to catch the eye of Rui Araizumi himself, which is extremely exciting given how much influence his style and Slayers in general influenced me.

The prompts are usually interesting and non-shipping-centric, which makes it easier for me to get creative as someone who prefers ‘cool’ to cuddly when left to my own devices. So, here we go!

Day 1 Prompt: Pokota- Not a character I’m super into or attempted to draw before, really, decided to try and give him a little of the vibe of a Sonic character being a little mascot dude as he is. I did come to like him a lot more last rewatch, though.

Day 2: Mazoku- With so many to pick from, I thought I would go for someone outside the lords/generals/priests but still recognizable, so I picked the tag team terrors of Kanzel and Mazenda from Slayers NEXT.

Day 3: Lina Inverse- I think Lina was the grand finale last time, but she gets an early appearance this time out. Lina is always fun to draw, in fact she’s basically my ‘test pattern’ whenever I get a new piece of software or hardware. Tangentially, my pal Evo sent me a new tablet, and these were all drawn on it. Funny, that!

Day 4: Supporting Character- Given so many to pick from, I decided to draw Ruma from Slayers Premium simply because I don’t think I’ve seen her get *any* fanart before. She’s got a cute design, I never actually noticed her cape was tattered and dirty until digging up reference pics. This and Day 7 are probably my favorites of the week.

Day 5: Sylphiel Nels Lahda- Or some spelling thereof. I don’t really have a lot to say about this one other than I had to redo her eyes because the first take made her look sly or seductive and I was going more for that gentle doe eyed look. I should also note up to here all of these images had no backgrounds because I was focused on the character art and hadn’t had time to play around much with the paint tools to make half decent backdrops.

Day 6: BroTP- Having two women as a ‘BroTP’ feels like stretching the term a bit but they always had a fun chemistry even if I prefer the main series to the specials basically any day of the week. It says something that they can literally fight against each other in a war then nonchalantly sit down and have lunch in a tavern like nothing happened. Best Frienemies.
Behind the scenes take, this one was *tough,* to be honest. I was having a Bad Anatomy Night and wound up using my Figma Body-Chan for reference photos, then scaling them to the proper heights made the proportions on the doll feel odd. I feel like I could have done better on this one, but given time constraints and working live on stream I gave it a solid “this is done.”

Day 7: Gourry Gabriev- Rounding off the week is the jellyfish brained sword prodigy himself, Gourry. Last time around I had him in an action pose, so this time I thought I’d show off his doofier side where he’s making the “Oh! I get it!” face but more than likely does not, in fact, get it.

If you’d like to check out submissions from people other than me, hit up the main blog at http://slayersweek.tumblr.com.

Hello, Cruel World

June 12, 2019 3/2 No Comments

So, I’ve decided that I’m going to start building up some more art/comic work and restructure the site around that, possibly ditching WordPress or looking into other plugins for content management. I’d apologize yet again for going *forever* without an update, but I fell into a habit of posting everything I draw or feel like blurting out in bite sized pieces on Twitter or live on my Twitch page then forgetting to come back and collect/repost the work. (I’ve also developed the probably not great habit of using a screencapping tool and pasting it into the tweet box instead of actually saving a properly optimized file locally. Ahem.)

It came to my attention last week though that the site had gone down as a result of some backend meddling on my part that I misinterpreted at a security issue, which lead to me opening a help line and being grilled for the better part of a half hour about my content, what I intend to do with it, and what I’d do if it all just vanished one day. Which did make me think a bit, but not about coughing up a monthly fee I can’t afford to protect my disorganized stash of hobby works. In all seriousness, I’ve been doing pretty okay the past few years on the art front, even if I hit a serious burnout point midway through last year I’m only kind of rebounding from now. So, I’ve made backups of pretty much everything of importance, and I have something of an idea of what I want to do going forward.

Portfolio and commission info need updated and fleshed out as I find myself occasionally stumped by things that are kind of outside my illustration wheelhouse but still want to lend a hand. I want to get a system going that will let me run multiple comic storylines as separate archives a la Clone Manga circa… when did I read that site last? And I still want to be able to write and ramble about games when I feel like, of course. Beefier projects like board/card games will likely get their own site and format to make them easier to track and expand on. And now that I mention that, I suddenly feel kind of bad I’ve been away from here so long my plane-girl game concept hasn’t been mentioned yet. I’d better gather my pics and fix that soon…

Portfolio updated!

October 25, 2018 3/2 No Comments

After yet another unannounced hiatus, I am back and have updated my Twitch commish page since this seems to have been a nice racket to fall into and I needed a place to gather some examples. Some of the stuff isn’t there due to the originals being on one or the other of my dead laptops (I should really do something about those…) or no longer being really used anywhere.

It’s been a busy spell, but I think I’m finally about caught up on work enough to pick away at some of my own stuff again. I’ve been jonesing pretty badly to play with some of my original characters.

Sketch dump!

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