mirage – THIRD HALF//

October Surprise (i updated)

October 10, 2020 3/2 No Comments

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

April Wrap Up

May 1, 2020 3/2 No Comments

w o w t h i s h a s b e e n a m o n t h

As “essential” labor, I haven’t exactly had the full Quarantine Experience, but it’s been an incredibly tense and unpleasant month plagued with mental and physical health problems. Still, I mostly stuck to my daily drawings other than when I felt too sapped one evening and doubled down the following day. I’m finally on the up swing after getting in touch with my doctor and getting some actual help- seems like it was a combination of a viral nervous infection and day to day wear and tear on my neck adding up into one nasty package.

As such, there’s a lot of drawings in this batch I’m not especially happy with since I wasn’t able to focus or in a couple cases manage a straight line, but it felt like I was finishing on a good note when I ended on just a page of face practices. Hope you enjoy still, a lot of these are Critical Heaven design work as per usual since I’m really enjoying picking at this project.

SAD-II: Winter of Discontent Masterpost

March 30, 2020 3/2 No Comments

The following are sketch posts through most of March. What a month and a half it’s been, holy crap. I did skip *one* evening due to an emergency room trip but doubled down the following day I took off to recuperate. Overall I feel like I should finding areas to push myself in more as Cute Anime Girls is kind of starting to stagnate as a subject for me at long last.

Bunch of Eishis
Tomcat wearing her shades over her eyes for once
I always kinda fall back on Lina when nothing else sounds fun to draw. Also attempted to draw MiG-21’s signature mic stand/missile pylon
Faces
More faces
lots of faces… from the same night as the other two
Hatsune Miku Day(o)
F-14 vs MiG-21
Playin’ With The Girls~
Nurse Lina wants you to wash your freaking hands.
Su-27 Flanker
Dassault Mirage III
Goils, Goils, Goils
Heavens Squadron
Radona Throwback Design
Neptune on a pudding
Lina coming in for the kill!
Rogue in the outfit I can’t not imagine her in
MiG-21 on the beach
Tomcat on the beach
Vash practicing self care
F-8 Crusader
R-9 Arrowhead
A-10 W… Thunderbolt II
SR-71 Blackbird beach pic
It’s the end of summer for U-2…
Misc figure sketches
Radona by a camp fire
If… when this is all over…

One more day of March technically remains so I’ll probably just append to this post tomorrow. I’m gonna try to get an earlier start on these while I’m off work for the week and hopefully have more nice stuff to show soon!

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.