welcome to the compound
This year’s theme was genres, which was another interesting set, Piku always puts a lot of effort into making these lists. I think my favorites are the Xellos and Filia Youtube beefing both in concept and I think they’re some of the sketches that turned out the best too. Some of the posts may be a bit out of order since I’m adding to the gallery from two different devices but I’ll try to touch them up and add a little commentary along the way.
Yeah! Whatever!
I’ve been trying to keep up a good (but not daily) drawing pace this month so far so I spend less time feeling rusty and crappy and also experiment a bit more. It’s been ages since I tried to just paint something without guidelines, so here’s a little speedpaint of V1 from Ultrakill. Only took an hour or two, really.
I did this one more or less for coloring practice since I haven’t been doing much of it lately. I’m still not a hundred percent feeling the red armor honestly!
I just kinda tossed this one together one night when I was feeling really achy and craving a hot soak.
Made another pass over Hornet’s armor design, I think I’d still like to tweak the skirt area and maybe change or ditch the hip armor. I’ll have another look at her ‘civvy’ dress sometime and try to make them look closer. I simplified her hair accessories a bit since the ‘wing’ clips on both sides just never looked the way I wanted them to. Her middle lock with the multiple clips is supposed to look like a bee stinger and the white wing clips were meant to be wasp wings, but didn’t really come off that way. I also stopped drawing her hair as tied with a bunch of bands so much as braided with a ribbon running through them to create a similar streak or band effect. I left the wings pretty plain this time since I’d like to make a nice copy of her wasp emblem I can re-use between illustrations of her. I made more of an effort to make the wings a decent size this time too. It’s kind of annoying trying to pick the Super Hornet references out of the regular Hornet references, by the way. I’m picky about this because I do plan to have her become a Super Hornet later on…
Probably one of the weaker feeling ones I’ve done so far this month, Gourry’s kind of squashed and Lina’s kind of tucked away but I wanted to emphasize the boy more since I draw so many Linas already.
When I was trying to think of ‘shout outs’ in Slayers I actually could think of more times other anime referenced it than it referenced other things. But when I think of Slayers making references I think of the Shampoo lookalike twins, Mimi and Nene. And the Col. Sanders bandit. But I went with these two.
I kinda feel like the drawings are starting to fall in line with my baseline quality from back when I was drawing basically every day which is good, but I must press onward!
I thought I’d play with the prompt a little and have Amelia building a couple models. I knew exactly which gunpla to start from, heh. I kind of picture the Zelgouf ‘stones’ being extra armor plates or missile pod covers.
I set the brush thickness way too heavy for this one and it looks like my old Sharpie comics. You might think that’s a good thing if you were around that far back. Thanks for being one of the real ones.
(That said this one kind of did shit numbers on the socials and I kind of blame there being too much text- people seem to like pictures that speak for themselves)
“What’s good, Valgaav?”
“Not much, just crossing the street.”
She’s not in full yandere mode but given that Sylphiel is a priestess capable of memorizing the highest black magic spell after just seeing it performed in front of her, she could definitely be dangerous if someone wrote her off…
Day 6- Idol Costume: I’d kind of like to go back and clean this one up. It’s actually done some Numbers and got retweeted by Rui Araizumi which is always hype and like the one thing I’ll miss about the site once it finally explodes. I have kind of mixed feelings about the abstract airbrush backgrounds I’ve been doing but it feels like it makes things a little less dull than just drawing on plain backdrops.
Day 7- The Magic Touch: This was hard to settle on an idea for given how many ways you can depict magic in Slayers so I wound up thinking about that scene in season 1 where Lina spends a while crafting amulets to sell. She’s supposed to be sprinkling powder on a lump of crystal but it kind of looks more like she’s zapping it. Not a fave tbh. Shoujo bubble brush in the background is kinda nice though.
Day 8: Destructive Savior: Originally I was going to have Lina shouting “Hey, I got your wallet back!” but I think it speaks for itself pretty well. People seemed to like this one.
Day 9: Divine Conflict- I’d never really tried to draw Shabranigdu before but I’ve done dragons. Probably could have replayed the episode where Lina tells their origin story for a better look at their full forms but I kind of just worked from memory and wiki screencaps.
Day 10: Super-deformed- Drawing a chibi basically felt like a ‘free space’ prompt. I always liked that bit in Try where Zelgadis spends the entire episode strumming guitar by himself, even when the haunted ship goes down. Honestly it was kind of more interesting how many younger fans didn’t seem to know the term “Super Deformed” for cute mini characters and drew like, weird, warped versions or surreal poses. Not gonna lie, for a minute I was thinking of drawing someone under the ‘turned into a chunk of meat being eaten by a snake forever’ curse since I like to take prompts in weird directions but decided to be… kinda normal. Also I did this to go with it.
In general, when I do these prompt lists, I like to strive to be ‘different’ in some way since I know a lot of fan artists default to glamor shots or shipping as subjects. No shade or anything, they’re having fun and some are definitely good at it. I’ve just always kind of been more into the action, adventure and comedy side of the series and try to put a sense of ‘fun’ into all my sketches through poses or picking subjects that are kinda out there. Hopefully I can keep it up! Day 11’s pic is going to have to wait, though, it’s late and I’m kind of under the weather so I’ll play catch up on my day off.
Theth out.