akpaley

[akpaley]

I think this is looking kind of nice. IDK how finished it's gonna get, but I think I want to at least get an impression of the full composition before I stop working on it.

[akpaley]

An experiment and a sketch I liked.

[akpaley]

Doodles of our DOS2 guys. I think the drawing in the middle top is still probably the most correct vibing alive Fane I've drawn.

[akpaley]

Our DOS2 guys, past and present :)

[akpaley]

Your maw agape I do not flee For peerless beauty this is he

[akpaley]

Subtitled I wonder how yonic can I make my body horror

[akpaley]

Aceta, Dextro's wizard mentor who routinely betrays everyone she works for, possibly including us.

[akpaley]

Lis, Fin's ex who does not particularly want to talk to us but is apprenticed to one of our buddies so here we are.

[akpaley]

Man I have so many scans just sitting on my hard drive waiting to be cleaned.

Honestly the main reason I don't post much. Cleaning traditional stuff up is just very annoying. Made more annoying by my baffling inability to have Photoshop and CSP both understand pen pressure at the same time, so doing the things I actually open up Photoshop for is much more annoying than it might otherwise be.

[akpaley]

Oh Sensation Sharp and snapping Long companion Hold me close Tell me I am bleeding slowly Torn to pieces Broken bones For all of that is just Sensation To hold, to love To live, to know

So the above artwork is a visualization of the above poem, but this whole thing is also... more than that?

Kaijja as a character in her current form draws a lot from my experiences with pain therapy and managing a chronic pain disorder. Half the prompt for her magic was this set of gifs and the other half was my experience of the psychological element of pain. Which is to say that pain is a response to a certain kind of nervous system activation and how manageable it is often depends on whether your brain thinks there's actually something wrong that needs fixing. Pain in erotic circumstances (not a thing I'm into, but) is often converted to pleasure because brain perceiving strong sensation as pleasurable and pain is strong sensation. I have dealt on and off with a chronic pain disorder for years now, and it is never so bad as when my nervous system is highly activated and I am afraid.

When you are thinking about pain all the time and experiencing sometimes very severe pain all the time and you are aware of that psychological piece but your thinking self still can't quite internalize that nothing is actually physically wrong with you, the concept of erotic pain becomes something of a power fantasy. Imagine you could feel this way, register all the sensations, and be able to treat the whole thing with the kind of joyous curiosity or even pleasure that would make this experience empowering instead of scary. Imagine that instead of making your world smaller this kind of sensation could expand it.

Kaijja was always going to be some kind of flesh paladin, but a lot of what is very core to her comes from that power fantasy, the pain that makes me visualize things moving under my skin or my flesh peeling away being both true and also beautiful. Kaijja isn't someone who doesn't experience pain, but the type of neutrality I have spent the last couple years learning and still don't have all the way down is her default. The bodily warning systems are sometimes informative, the texture of the sensations is interesting, and through the last decade or so she has been conditioned to find the extremes of both erotic. When Kaijja is in too much pain to function well it's because the experience is overwhelming and distracting, not excruciating.

Which presents a problem when the cause of that kind of overwhelm is suddenly actual bodily harm instead of being safely taken apart and reassembled by someone who loves you, and all of your instincts still say this is interesting and lovely and you should settle in and ride it out. When you are aware that there is a difference between your body signals and actual reality and on an emotional lizard brain level you can't tell the difference.

This poem is about not being able to tell the difference.

It is also about me. Not being able to tell the difference.

I don't think it would be so gentle as it is if it weren't also a kind of soft, self-soothing reflection. For her, it's the quiet acknowledgement that this is real. For me, it is the gentle reminder that it is not. A statement that I am in love with the wondrous thing of living, even when the hard parts speak to me from underneath my skin.

[akpaley]

Very messy photo study.

[akpaley]

A pair of pieces I did for a friend's zine.

[akpaley]

One of the things I learned post-end of the Great Spirit game was that the box with Jinan's soul in it contained a weird sorcerer human child. In our universe, Jinan transferred their soul over, killing the child body, and never learned they ever had a human body til well after the campaign. I imagine when we do our epilogue short they will be having a little crisis about that information. BUT.

Ash has stated that if they hadn't transferred the soul over, the big bad would have found a very inopportune time to pull the child body out of the box, thus disconnecting Jinan from their robot body and forcing them to deal with being a human child who had to be in physical contact with the robot body to pilot it for a bit. And it is very fun to think about the much bigger crisis that would have caused, especially since Jinan very much identifies with the robot body and their lack of humanity.

[akpaley]

Jinan doodles and epilogue redesign thoughts.

[akpaley]

It seemed like roughly time for a new avatar, given the last one was from three years ago.

[akpaley]

Rendering practice for slightly more complex objects.

[akpaley]

Happy new year, it's time to post a bunch of stuff from last year