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.
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.
I usually try to be on time with Secret Santa participation but there was kind of a perfect storm of stuff that kept me. All the prompt requests were pretty good but I had to run with the one asking for a cyberpunk take on Valgaav from Slayers Try. He spends about half the season with big nasty dragon arms, so it sounded like it would be fun to turn him into a cyborg. Who am I kidding, I’d turn anyone into a cyborg!
Once again this year, I participated in a Slayers themed prompt list for October, and this time the prompts were all themed around emotions, which was an interesting round of them to work with. Some of them were harder than others or overlapped a bit, but I did my best to keep them distinct. I inadvertantly wound up adding the bonus challenge of making (nearly) all of them Lina doing different expressions for practice’s sake of focusing on one character doing different things. (I sort of expected certain characters to show up a lot for certain prompts and try to cover ground other artists in the challenge don’t take on.) Since Twitter sucks for being remotely orderly, here’s the whole lot of them in one convenient pile. Enjoy, or else I’ll really go on a rampage!
That is a Slayers joke, if I happen to be on any kind of watch list right now.
