agentredfort - Tumblr blog

[agentredfort]

I read ruby redfort like... a long time ago and don't remember much of anything, but I stumbled across your blog and your art and OH MY GOSH THE COLORS THE TEXTURES THE LIGHTING IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL i love it so much!! Each piece is so colorful and vibrant and detailed while still being cohesive and understandable, which is something I'm not great at doing in my art so I am in so much awe. literally gasped aloud when I saw the meet the team drawings. jdjfksk. so awesome!!

THANK YOU! :D i enjoy working with colors, and this just so happens to be a series with a serious color/sensory motif, so I'm taking that as my cue to go wild. baby primary school me always wanted to draw fanart for this series but didn't have the capability. so i'm taking this as my opportunity to vindicate my past self a bit.

[agentredfort]

Ruby Redfort characters as ridiculous spy-themed stock images: the series!

(references below the cut)

Keep reading

[agentredfort]

you know the thing in cartoons when characters are spying on something, and their heads are all stacked on top of each other, defying physics? this is that :D

(i like to think blacker’s standing on a desk chair, and hitch is just too cool for gravity)

[agentredfort]

[agentredfort]

the end is near; or, the immediate aftermath of new year's eve, 1973

[appears after nearly four years of radio silence] haha hey guys hows it going. i wrote most of this fic back in august when i re-read the second half of bayd and went insane over it, and then wrote the rest of it in one afternoon and didn't really proofread it. enjoy!

[agentredfort]

Hey, guys. Guess what?

RUBY: Jeez louise, it feels like forever since we touched this question box. Hi! Did you miss us?

FROGHORN: I'll tell you what I didn't miss: hearing your incessant, irrelevant, and frankly dangerously illegal question-answering during work hours. Why don't you go break your governmental NDA on your own time?

RUBY: Because it's more fun doing it behind LB's back, obviously.

BLACKER: We've already established you live life on the edge, yes.

((WE'RE BACK! The coding team is back in business, at least for a little while - now with vastly improved art, and a refreshed obsession for the fandom! The rules for this rebooted ask blog are as follows:

No NSFW asks! This is a kid's book series, so we're going to try to stay clear of that sort of thing. Swearing is all right, though.

Canon relationships only - no asks about noncanon shipping. Don't expect too much romance out of this.

I reserve the right to just not answer any asks I don't have the energy/drive to reply to. If I haven't replied to an ask, that either means I'm slowly working on it, or I just don't feel like answering. Don't take it personally - feel free to ask something else in the meantime.

Please don't spam. See above.

I'm doing this blog for fun, and I have no idea how long I'll have the motivation to keep it up this time round. Just enjoy it while it lasts.

With all that out of the way... SEND IN THOSE QUESTIONS.))

[agentredfort]

Big post of all the Ruby Redfort fanart that I've made (so far). Sir that's my emotional support children's book series

[agentredfort]

having literally JUST finished my own reread, I have to say I agree - the LB and Bradley development takes point in this book, to crushing effect, but it does that at the detriment to a lot of the other relationships. i need emotional resolution. maybe i'll go write some more terribly angsty fic about it.

I've finally finished the Ruby Redfort series after reading the first few when I was 10 (I am now 20), and whilst the last book was awesome GOD I wish it had been given the space of 2 books. Child's been great at building suspense and tension in the former books but I feel that she was given far too little space to tie up so many loose ends in BAYD to the point that we lose out on the little quirks of interactions between characters, Ruby's thoughts, etc. that make the books so enjoyable. I barely recognised Clancy and Hitch at the end because their interactions with Ruby had no detail, completely flattening the impact of Hitch's return and Ruby's conflict with her trust of Hitch. Hitch was acting like a cardboard cutout for like the entire book, just used to carry plot, because there seemed to be a lack of space for the usual warm and wacky interactions they usually had.

On a positive note, the lack of Clancy's usual involvement aside from as a plot device to provide Ruby with 'hunches' made me suspect that somehow HE could be the impostor, which raised the suspense. But once I realised he wasn't, the lack of the usual dialogue with clancy felt like he was being neglected. I guess the redirection of focus from he and Hitch really stood out to me, and whilst that redirection gave us amazing development of LB and BB (and Ruby herself), I was left with so many questions about Ruby's relationships with these people immediately after the events of the series, which could have been rectified with some slower pacing.

In short: let Ruby and Hitch show emotion please I BEG.

Also: what was with the 3 books of talking about Ruby's tiredness and trauma and never showing a properly emotional moment where this is addressed?? It felt like a build up to nothing. Ruby's an emotionally withdrawn kid but she's not a robot cmon.

[agentredfort]

It barely feels like being human anymore. Now, say something hopeful.   After the lake, Ruby can’t sleep. Blacker keeps watch—there's nobody else to do it.

Good lord, has it really been three entire years since I last wrote for this fandom? And all it took was an in-depth reread of the full series to pull me back into doing it.

Rereading got me thinking a LOT about Ruby's relationship with the adults around her, and the different ways she's loved by the people she knows.... and then That One Scene from BaYD came in to smash me in the side of a head like a brick, and this came tumbling out.

Do I have way too many thoughts about Agent 'We Don't Even Know His Goddamned First Name' Blacker and the way he interacts with Ruby? Maybe. This is a little bit about that. But it's also about Ruby being thirteen and filled with absurd amounts of grief. Have fun.

[agentredfort]

somebody needs to study the pipeline from reading ruby redfort as a kid to getting into fiction podcasts as an adult. what's that about? why is it so common?

[agentredfort]

The last character you drew/wrote about is now stuck in the last game you played. How screwed are they?

[agentredfort]

loveday....

[image description: digital art of LB from the Ruby Redfort books. She's a black woman with short natural hair, dressed in a white suit. She's adjusting her glasses and looking solemnly to one side. The background is made up of pastel swirls of color fading into white.]

[agentredfort]

some perspective and bg practice with ruby and clancy! not entirely happy with it but that’s what practice is for. and i like drawing these guys anyway so it was fun 

i like to think about how clancy canonically skateboards. he’s a cool guy

[agentredfort]

i reread pick your poison earlier this week, and my favorite bits of these books are the 'ruby busts the case wide open while everybody stares at her' scenes. also, any excuse to draw blacker.

[Image description: A digital comic of a scene from Ruby Redfort: Pick your Poison. The style is very colourful with small doodles and blocks of colour in the background to fill up panel space.

Page 1: Ruby and Blacker enter a lab where Agent SJ is sitting. She smiles at them and asks, "More 'possibly poisoned' beverages?". Ruby responds while looking at the soda bottle she is holding, "Yeah. I mean... I doubt it is." Handing the bottle to SJ she continues, "Actually, I think the bottle contains some kind of code." SJ adjusts the goggles on her head with a questioning expression. The rest of the page is taken up by one large panel filled with doodles and arrows illustrating Ruby's train of thought as she says, "I think it's contained in the taste? Or rather, the flavours." In the background is a map of Twinford, drawing of a man drinking and a diagram of a plastic bottle. "When the guy sipped it, he seemed to be analysing it, trying to decipher what was in it... And once he figured it out, he wrote it down." Several arrows, flies and bubble-like circles float around the dialogue boxes. "Oh, yeah, and there's what's printed printed on the reverse of the label. You can see it through the liquid... FOUR GREAT TASTES SINCE 1922. I'm sure it means more than what it seems to mean, if you know what I mean?"

Page 2: The comic returns to individual square panels as Ruby's ramble comes to an end. Blacker and SJ stand in silence for a moment, looking at Ruby. She asks "...Am I rambling?", and Blacker scratches his head and smiles as he replies, "Only a little. But I follow you." Ruby says, "That's good," and then gestures, saying "So anyway, before I taste it for myself, I'd like to know for certain that one of the ingredients isn't toxic." (A label pointing to her states that she is "getting better at impulse control".) Blacker lets out a small laugh and SJ walks away holding the bottle, saying "Always wise." At the bottom of this page, under the panels is a row of two soda bottles and several science beakers labelled "salty","sweet", "bitter" and "sour". /End description]

(original scene under cut)

[agentredfort]

shrimplications

[image description: simple digital illustration of ruby and clancy, sitting in a tree together. ruby says, very seriously, 'have you considered the shrimplifications, clance'. clancy replies, equally seriously, 'i've prawndered them, rube'. end description.]

[agentredfort]

[agentredfort]

just Spectrum things

[image description: four colorful digital doodles with ruby and various members of spectrum. in the first, hitch is ruffling her hair as she ducks away and grins. in the second, she's sprawled halfway across a table, pointing at something blacker's writing down as they two of them talk in unintelligible mathematical scribbles. in the third, she and LB are having a staring competition from either end of a table - LB is leaning back in her chair while ruby is leaning forward. in the last, ruby and SJ are both wearing lab safety goggles and looking delighted as they make a bunsen burner flame rainbow. end ID.]