I’ve been putting a serious effort into improving the quality of my line art and coloring lately, and finally kind of feel like I’m kind of… happy with it? I still wanna tweak my avatar’s design to be a little less ‘smol’ looking but the overall look of the saggy jacket and white bangs i dig. Originally the concept was for there to just be a patch over the missing eye to kind of imply whatever happened to it bleached it, but I kind of liked the light front part after settling for it in a picrew a while back.
Been in a mood to draw Radona a lot lately, for some reason, but I’ve also been back on my plane girl kick again thanks to back to back USAF Museum visits. It was nice to get some direct input on some of the ‘lore’ stuff I’ve been kicking around and I feel like I’m going in a good direction.
Also, been playing with a sketch app on my phone that’s actually decent(!) and found a good stylus for the tiny-ass screen. If anyone’s wanting a pretty robust art program with a freebie version, IbisPaint has been very good to me so far. Seal of approval or something goes here.
Unfortunately, said phone is also kind of on the fritz and probably going to need replaced, which I’m dreading since I spent the afternoon setting everything back up from factory resetting the thing. Customer service line keeps repeating the same “have you tried turning it off and on” line and this all started after a firmware update so I have a feeling it’s something they can’t actually fix on their end. Bleah.
Happy June, fellow meat on the grill! Heat and humidity are like my elemental weaknesses, so I’m doing my best to avoid the glowing Orb of Fuckness and keep the airflow going in my apartment.
I know I was all fired up about plane girls and game design and stuff, and I still am, but lately I’ve been really feeling my dragon girl Radona and thinking about what to actually do with her.
She basically came into being when I was on a big 80s fantasy anime/game kick, mostly brought on by Valis and Astalon, and I kind of just thought of her as just a random fun character to doodle when nothing else sounded good. She feels like she’d be a great character to make some sprites of and throw into GameMaker to fool around and learn the program, or otherwise exist as a prototyping assistant. She’s kind of just this upbeat, adventurous half-dragon who lives to roam around and see the world with the ‘catch’ being she’s superhumanly strong and really has no sense of danger in regards to herself.
Sometimes I think about things that would be really interesting to apply to her in a bigger picture story or something- she’s going to live a *really* long time and that kind of thing paired with nigh-indestructibility and a general lackadaisical attitude would pretty believably lead to her just being completely out of touch with general humanity in a non malevolent way, just, things like promising to come back and visit someone and only remembering to do so by the time their grandkids are all that are left, or ‘settling down’ and starting a family, repeatedly, getting bored once the kids grow up and hitting the road again to the point where any time she sees someone with dragon blood she gives them a little sniff to be sure they’re not her offspring.
For a while, a few years back, I was thinking about doing a reset of Revolver Knight using some story ideas from online roleplaying and well, generally approaching it with a better idea of how stories fucking work. A lot of the ‘rules’ from that reboot still stuck with me as good ideas and I’ve been kind of retroactively applying them to the tentative Wanderer Radona setting, along with some stuff that was intended for the Irrgarten card game. I almost wonder if it would be a good idea to redesign Radona’s gun blade into a revolver style one and just recycle the title since I’m sitting on the domain name.
I think,maybe, she’s another character that just kind of gelled for me out of traits I wish I had or feel like I’d like to have around. It’s not quite the same as like a Twitter Artist Waifu thing, but more like designing your own muse or cheerleader. Eishi has bottomless optimism, Tomcat is like a ‘cool big sis’ who acts like a goof but is low key wise and powerful, and Radona is brave, adventurous, and not tied down by anything.
Also Flanker is a little troll bitch and sometimes being pointlessly antagonistic sounds really fun! But alas, I live in a society.
It seems like the weather is finally trending warmer, but still likes to randomly throw us a freeze advisory curveball and otherwise wobble up and down by 30 degrees over the course of the day and make my sinus cavities writhe in pain. Thank you, industrialists who bravely accelerate the climate crisis in the name of pleasing stockholders.
Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my ACL tear! I choose to celebrate it because I’ve ended up in the ER one way or another each spring for the past 3 years and I’ve vowed to watch my back until Summer officially begins this time. Observing the date involved shitposting, as do most standard dates.
The actual point of this post is that I’m getting really sick of hearing about AI features being rolled out and promoted on art platforms despite being massively unpopular with actual artists. I already wasn’t wild about it being pretty constant background radiation in art spaces lately, and I kind of snapped when TGL fan page runner Arseniy randomly commented on one of my sketches, that I could make something “actually cool” if I fed my sketches into an AI generator as if I was incapable of finishing a piece or making something appealing on my own. Between the phrasing and the fact that my TGL fan art is like the only thing I make that isregularly stolen and reposted it really rubbed me the wrong way, even if he didn’t mean anything by it. Plenty of people see AI as a tool, or a way to optimize work flow, but the stuff just inherently doesn’t work without ingesting mass sample data and it’s been shown time and time again that the people developing the shit don’t bother asking permission and are including ways to specifically copy the styles of specific artists. It would bug the heck out of me if I had a tool that would take care of inking for me but needed to trawl someone’s portfolio for just the perfect hair stroke.
It really fucking sucks that it’s difficult to build reach online without making use of social media. I understand wholeheartedly that most people don’t go out of their way to look at things, hell, most of the time I don’t bother loading up my deviantart (which ALSO rolled out AI generation tools, which is one of the dickest moves since ‘move forward and back a lot’) and only visit pixiv when Discord friends post porn from it. Discord *itself* is now force feeding people its new Clyde AI which will be peeping in on your conversations and presumably funneling it to fuel something else that sucks.
So, I’m really, seriously going to make an effort to use my site more. I don’t intend to run ads or anything. I may even revert to a static HTML template again out of spite since nobody is commenting anyway and it’s easier to make things look how I want than trying to sweet talk WordPress into doing things like “show archives of this category in a nice way” or “incorporate a webcomic navigation bar in a way that doesn’t require an unsupported plugin.” Hell that kind of goes back to the initial point, because I think most people are either using Webtoon or some other hosting site instead of their own.
In all honesty, I have thought of just letting my domain and hosting account lapse due to inactivity, but I like having MY space that I can control how I like. Last year, I made a grand total of like $50 on artwork due to Paypal shenanigans and one of my friends being busy on the road and not paying up as yet. I thought there was more, but when I pulled up my receipts from last year most of the incoming funds were when I was injured so I could order delivery. So, I run my stuff at a loss because I like creating, and I like helping my friends more than opening requests to everyone just because I like helping my friends. That’s why I’m weird about commissions. This also reminded me my friends rock. Thanks a bunch, guys!
I hope that you check back often, I’m still working on some game ideas and will probably keep the minutiae here or in my Discord’s skunk works channel so the ideas don’t just rot in my head forever.
Anyway, here’s some sketches I did since last posting; I actually invested in a Good PC finally but I’m adjusting everything how I like it.
