bluebeads-art

[bluebeads-art]

Wow, I know I have a banger art piece when 1) exporting a .png takes longer than some Blender 3D renders, and 2) it...? apparently made Photoshop CS6 freak out so hard that it?? changed the resolution of my display monitor??? huh????

I don't entirely blame it, this drawing is like 80% CRT TV texture and that's a nightmare to compress, but still, hello?!?

[bluebeads-art]

I need to go back to cell shading, dude. I have a finished piece that I'm holding off on posting for reasons and another nearly-finished WIP that I did painterly shading on, and they've both taken a million years.

Random side tangent is it's amusing to me to go from following In Stars and Time tags to Deltarune tags and seeing a bunch of familiar art styles. And I'm not immune to the fandom migration either, that's what the WIP is. Indie game enby protagonist appreciation artist squad.

[bluebeads-art]

2025 April 25th

Never draw in the same art style twice in a row. Keep 'em guessing, baby!!!

Rambling and close-up under the cut

I got a TourBox NEO recently and wanted something quick(ish) and straightforward to draw while I got the hang of it. For lack of any better ideas I just hit Siffrin with the semi-realism beam. It ended up being a good call because soft shading forces me to use a bunch of different brushes and brush settings, and that was good to train me to actually use their shortcuts. My drawing setup banishes my keyboard to the ether, and my old and current tablet have 5 and 10 (inconvenient) shortcut buttons respectively, so I had more important things to map there. But now I have hotkey allowance with ✨button combos✨ and it's very cool and good. I haven't used it for long but I recommend it if you can justify the price tag.

There wasn't a cohesive plan for how I wanted Siffrin to look realism'ed, btw. I just looked at the official art element-by-element, went "how would I interpret that in physical space?", and then committed vibes to page with no extra thought beyond the bonus knowledge from the dev's nose reveal post, lmao. I'm a little meh on their hair because of that, the front and back feels disconnected. I'm happy with their face and cloak though. Thick & chunky fabric folds, my beloved. Also droopy eyes my beloved because I can just reference myself and boom, EZ PZ.

The main brushes I used from the Clip Studio Asset browser are SU-Cream Pencil (content ID: 1761353) for line art and crisp shadows, and uuuhhh Japanese name I'm too monolingual to read brush (content ID: 1692270) for general shading. (Drop the brush density & opacity a bit and draw lightly with it. Any pencil can be a paint brush if you try hard enough.)

Time taken was 9 hours and 17 minutes.

[bluebeads-art]

For my periodic "Hi I'm still alive and relatively well" post, have a list of various thoughts and realizations from all the anatomy studies I've been doing:

Ears are WAY farther back on the head than I thought. (Must have confused the front of the ear being at the half-way point with the back at some point and then never corrected it.)

Pelvises are much taller than I thought.

Where the collarbone connects to the arm is weird. When you raise your arm, where does it go. I think the deltoid eats it but idk.

Shoulder blades move in mysterious ways so I'm entirely winging them.

Looking at musculature models, I have no idea why armpits are shaped the way they are. I'm blaming it on subcutaneous fat and calling it a day.

Thighs have a TON of goofy muscles and I'm struggling to find good shortcuts to simplify them, especially since they twist with upper leg rotation.

Knees are held together with toothpicks, scotch tape, and suffering. Evolution has failed us.

Forearm twist is my new least favorite thing and I'm going to start gnawing on my anatomy books like a rabid dog.

[bluebeads-art]

I'm still alive and working on art, btw. I've just been rapidly ricocheting between four projects because they sorta intertwine. Three of them are 3D modeling projects— one of which is long-term— and the not-3D one is anatomy studies with no finish line and not a lot to show for it at the moment. 😂

Sadder side is I haven't been interacting with folks much lately because uUUuhh I'm a vulnerable minority in the United States. If you've paid attention to global politics at all, you can guess what that means. So my time and energy that usually goes into socializing has been going into planning for emergencies instead. And I have less time and energy to start with because of regularly scheduled depression time, baby!! I've been kicking ass with art and everything else is a dissociated blur. ✌️

(it gets worse under the cut)

Jokes aside, uuhh yeah, it's getting real bad here. Hopefully once I get two out of the three 3D modeling projects out of the way I'll post more often, but until then I'll try to uh.. have occasional account activity like this to signal I'm alive? In less of a jokey way now?? I don't want to alarm anyone, but with my health insurance under direct threat, the odds of my continued existence have notably decreased???

I don't want to TMI in public, but I'm disabled. If Medicaid gets killed, I have very few other options to get insurance, if any. And if I lose access to my medication and other health services, my quality of life goes into free-fall, sssoOOo... yeah...... I'm not finishing that sentence yet. And that's on top of the general health risks of being a minority living in the US right now.

Unfriendly reminder that if you're American and voted for and/or supported this, yet still follow me for some reason: Get the fuck out. <3 I hate you and will always hate you for what you've enabled.

[bluebeads-art]

2024 December 24th

SECRET SANTA ATTACK!! A beetle Loop for my gift victim @petrii-dish >:3c

I saw "insects" and "Loop" on their wishlist and neurons started firing. I'm always saying that I love when people creature-fy characters I like, but I've never done the creature-ing myself until now!

While going through Pep's blog for inspiration, I saw art of a woolly chafer beetle drawn by @/bowelfly. I'd never seen them before, and let me tell you they're the cutest bug I've ever seen and I was obsessed with them immediately. So round... so woolly...

As I was going down the woolly chafer appreciation rabbit hole, I started noticing traits I could incorporate into Loop's design. And thus; beetle Loop! :] (Although their antennae are more common cockchafer inspired. Their big antenna fans are so fancy!)

Lots of rambling and bonus art of a much more beetle-looking Loop under the cut, so be warned if you're squicked by bugs

The creatuuuure. Boop here was my first time trying to draw organic shapes with vanishing point guides and such. It went... okay...? No clue how people apply that to more complicated shapes like people though, heh.

Anyways, back to the humanoid Boops. The design elements I focused on were the antenna leaves looking like those shards of light you can see in the opening CG and some of Loop's portraits, the fluff and tibia spikes substituting for Loop's skin frizzles, wings with veins made up of constellations, and that very peculiar angular elytra shape. ;)

I had to stop myself from going ham and making the design super detailed, because I wanted it to look like something you could reasonably imagine in-game. I think I did alright in that regard! Their suspicious elytra ended up feeling fitting too, since only seeing them from the front in-game would make that foreshadowing more subtle. Also, while my decision to make them a beetle was 100% just "I really love that beetle I saw", I like the implication that the Universe was like, "Stars, you have a thick shell. Become a beetle." 😂

I struggled for a bit trying to place clock hands in the first drawing, but then I started to think that a handless clock is kinda fitting? Love when I can cover laziness with symbolism. :P

Time taken on designing and the first two drawings was 31 hours and 34 minutes (I forgot to tally them separately whoops), and beetle Boop took 8 hours and 44 minutes. It was supposed to be a doodle (because common cockchafers are sometimes called "doodlebugs" get it-) but I'm SO bad at doodling. Got lost in the perspective ruler sauce.

Check out @isat-secretsanta-2024 for more cool art, and have a happy holiday! ♥

[bluebeads-art]

Hey Blue I need you to know that I think about your “Isa Pink FLASHBANG” post I think literally Every Day and it always makes me snort out a laugh out loud. I haven’t figured out how to explain to my coworkers that I’m laughing thinking about that post, but that’s Their Problem. It’s both Gorgeous and *Absolutely Hilarious*

Thank you so much for the gift to Art- it is Beautiful and brings So Much Joy

YEAH the eternal struggle of wanting to share jokes with people that require too much context... I know that plight well... u_u

Heughdgjd thank you so much for the kind words!! It's always wild to hear about my art sticking with people?? Like, logically yeah it must for at least a few people, but since I can't read minds it's just not something I think about unprompted? So when folks like you mention stuff like this, it gives me that happy-surprised-confused "wwhhhat do you mEAn? that my creations have a lasting impact on people?? huh?!?? :O"

Especially when it makes people happy specifically, like YES... this is what I strive for... To improve people's days even if it's just in little ways. I love art I love making art I'm so glad I got out of my years-long art funk (even though I think I just hit a patch of burn-out, wHOOPS... Might force myself to take a proper holiday break after I finish the thing I'm working on and hope that I can continue this momentum afterwards. 😆)

[bluebeads-art]

Hihihi!!! Im your secret Santa! I draw and i wanna let you know that im so intimidated!/pos your drawings are very good!!! Anyway bye!!!!!!! (I also just discovered you did "the cost of staying silent"?????? I love that fic!)

Hellooo! Thank you so much!! :D

and fsjfdshjf oh no. Coincidentally I was recently joking with myself about how I mainly want to be a Cool Talented Artist Person because when Cool Talented People interact with me I feel weirdly honored, and I want to pass that honored feeling along to others. But then I realized Oh No, but Cool Talented People can be intimidating! I don't wanna be scary though!!

All that to say please don't worry too much because I've totally been there and I feel for you. ^^;

Also I'm like impossible to disappoint because I joined the ISaT Secret Santa because I love clobbering people with gift art. Getting clobbered in return is a rare bonus! :3 Like really rare! I have a folder of all the gift art I've ever gotten so I can cherish them forever, and there's not a whole lot considering that folder is 18 years old? (oh god it's 18 years old...) Because speaking of being intimidated, interacting with people is hard! So I've barely ever engaged with art trades, gift exchanges, etc etc until now. So no matter what, getting gift art means a lot to me!

Good luck and have fun! :]

Edit: ok I've been overthinking how my wording here could be misinterpreted for like a full day lmao, so I gotta specify that by wanting to be a Cool Talented Artist Person I mostly just mean that I want to get good at art to be an inspiration to others in the way other artists have inspired me. My ego is of reasonable size, I swear. 😂 But also I spent like 2/3rds of my life with self esteem in the negative numbers, I've earned a LITTLE bit of ego, as a treat.

[bluebeads-art]

2024 November 21st

INTO THE LAKE WITH YOU, MUD CHILD

My part of a retroactive art trade with @anxiousapplepie ! "Retroactive" because I was already drawing this before we agreed to make it part of a trade, heheh. December 2nd edit: BEHOLD!... THEIR HALF OF THE TRADE... Eleven whole pages of trade!! Go read it go read it go read it

I read this post about their Role!Swap AU, and, like, multiverse shenanigans? Check. Characters goofing off and having fun? Check. Several opportunities for slapstick humor? Check. Conclusion: I really wanted to draw it. Physical comedy is my specialty. :p

This thing is kinda all over the place composition wise (looking at you, relative sizes of speech bubbles) because there is Too Much going on in these panels and I Did Not plan ahead of time, lmao. This was supposed to be doodlier than it ended up being, so as a growing pain it's a funny jumble of consistency. One of these days I'll be able to doodle without getting carried away. 😂

More rambling and close-ups under the cut

This interaction in particular is what nudged me over the edge to draw this whole thing. I don't know what Fighter Mirabelle's malfunction is when it comes to the Siffrins, but it lets me make Sif the butt of a joke again, so yeehaw! His hat being catapulted out of frame made me laugh when I was thinking of what to do with the composition-complicating hat in question.

Also my personal take is Siffrin is 100% having the time of their life here. Making new(?) friends? Being involved in a fun group activity? Well worth inhaling some puddle water and having to go jump in The Lake to wash the mud off later.

Bonnie being so furious they changed art styles wasn't in my original plan, but I'm so glad I thought of it on a whim because it made me laugh Every Time I looked at their face. 😂

Time taken on this whole thing was 42 hours and 50 minutes. AND. I KNOW THAT SOUNDS BAD. IF YOU KNOW I'M TRYING TO SPEED UP MY ART PROCESS. But this project gets a special pass. This was the farthest out of my art comfort zone I've been in a while! 13 (mostly) full-body characters at various complicated angles, 2 backgrounds, learning to use CSP's perspective rulers, effects I'm not used to like water splashes, etc etc. I made progress on speeding up sketching & line art as well! Some of the lines you see are just extremely cleaned up sketch. I was able to let myself fudge things more too. For example, Mira's dress is a very "dude just trust me" simplification because I don't know how the clothes folds would work at that angle. ^^;;

So while there's still a handful of things I'm not happy with, it's worth it for the learning experience and perfectionism-busting progress! Also for the sake of drawing silliness, of course.

Oh, lastly; the KO sprite is the one from in-game, so it was made by insertdisc5 and not me.

[bluebeads-art]

"Out of curiosity, where did I leave off my 3D modeling project before my ISaT hyperfixation scruffed me by the neck 3 months ago?"

[Opens Blender.] Project file is in the middle of rigging a complicated and entirely improvised double-jointed robotic leg that has pistons and cables. My To-Do notes don't specify what system I was last working on. I jiggle a pole target and two deformation bones don't copy the rotation of the IK system correctly. [Closes Blender.]

...that's a problem for future-tense BlueBead. :3

—

I think I know why it's breaking, but I Do Not have the time to detangle it right now, I've got art deadlines and a WIP queue for once. :0

This poor project, man. I just keep putting it off for every reason under the sun. I started it 3.5 years ago. 😂

I'm still shocked 3-months-ago me got the piston part to integrate with the IK system at all. I gave that section of the IK chain stretching privileges, but metal can't stretch. So instead, each piston segment copies the location of either the head or tail of the IK bone while damped tracking to the opposite end. So as the IK stretches, they slide towards and away from each other. Looks nice! And the stretching helps solve IK knee pop too! But I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop and for me to find some huge problem with it. x') There's no way my first idea for how to rig this thing ends up working flawlessly, right?

You'd think the rotation issues I mentioned before would have something to do with that transform inheriting mess, but nope! They (probably) relate to a much more traditional part of rigging that I have no excuse for screwing up, hehee <3

[bluebeads-art]

2024 November 11th

Drops the world's weirdest WIP teaser and does not elaboration.

Okay some explanation: I'm workin' on this thing based on @anxiousapplepie's Role!Swap AU, and I'm trying to be zoomy about it because it'll take an eternity otherwise (I gotta draw 13 characters total, help). So I thumbnailed Fighter!Odile's pose without thinking too hard on it.

Then much later, my brain connected a dot and the gotdang Friday night meme started to haunt me. It's not the exact pose, but the vibes are right. So I broke my usual "no posting WIPs because it ruins the surprise" policy to get this out of my system.

It holds me accountable to finish this eventually at least, since it mmmight get interrupted by the ISaT Gift Exchange? You know how it is with stale WIPs, they can be hard to pick back up sometimes.

[bluebeads-art]

THE BAD THOUGHTS CAN'T HURT YOU IF YOU DON'T THINK

NOTHING EXISTS IN MY HEAD RIGHT NOW THAT IS NOT ART-MAKING RELATED

I WILL NOT AND CAN NOT BE STOPPED

[bluebeads-art]

2024 November 2nd

(You see a vision of the fuchsia.)

Context and some BlueBead Drawing Workflow Lore™: I convert a copy of my line art to pixel art by crunching it with levels and posterization so that I can quickly paint bucket in flat colors. However, when making the flats layer, I fill it in with a "missing texture" bright fuchsia first so I know if I missed any spots or if there's orphaned pixels.

While working on my last major drawing, Isabeau and Siffrin got to rock some fuchsia hair dye and Mirabelle got to enjoy a flashy shawl for a while because I thought they looked cool. And out of that trio, I deemed Isa most likely to inflict minor psychic damage on his friends for the bit. 😆

A close-up, the WIP Fuchsia Gang, and more rambling under the cut

Gosh I love drawing disgruntled / disgusted expressions so much, you can get so scrunchy with them. I think drawing stupid facial expressions is my favorite part of being an artist, genuinely. 😂

WIP of [this drawing] from October 15th! Siffrin with partial pink hair dye unironically slaps in my opinion.

Time taken on the comic was 20 hours and 31 minutes. Been trying to speed things up, but I was having too much fun playing with new line art brushes and special effects. I'm getting better at ignoring tiny inconsequential things I'd want to endlessly tweak though!

Will I ever draw in the same art style twice in a row? Who knows. :) I've been slowly trending towards the style I draw my OCs in, but it's not fully there yet, lol.

Is this post spoilers??? I feel like it's only spoilers if you know the right context for things, but heck it, it gets spoiler tagged.

[bluebeads-art]

2024 October 30th

A little companion post to my [previous post] because idk where else to put this thing, haha. Round things are difficult to get good still shots for. :')

Since I care less about Tumblr potentially booting me from fandom tags for having a link in this post, have a direct link to the adorable game Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival! Wowie!

[bluebeads-art]

2024 October 30th

A friend introduced me to the game Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival (by adamgryu on itch.io) and I was so thoroughly charmed by it that I dropped everything to plan out a carving. Pumpkin carving is very serious business after all. :]

I really didn't expect it to come out this well! The carving in that game is a technical marvel but it is uhhhh fussy. And not very precise. And while you get an undo button, there's no eraser or means to sketch!

I descended into madness a lil' bit on Siffrin, but they're recognizable! Success!! RIP to his eyebrow and silver pins though. The mental gymnastics required for his eye/hair and hand did collateral damage to them. Loop's hand also took me like 6 tries lmfao.

Bonus stuff under the cut!

Ghost selfie ghost selfie!

If 2024's server is still up while you're reading this and you want to see my pumpkin for yourself, have directions!

Go to the Forgotten World alternate universe, turn right from the spawn point, and hang right following the road. You should see a big arch sign for "Dusty Fields." Follow the road under it, and my pumpkin is on the left near the red barn!

Time taken on the digital art part was 4 hours and 7 minutes. Loop took half the time Siffrin did, they were MADE for the polygon lasso tool. No clue how long I spent head-in-hands-ing on the carving part, haha.

Bonus WIP lore! I did a little test to get a feel for the restrictions of carving before I started drawing, and behold their magnificence:

Can you see why I was surprised the final pumpkin came out good? I had "Expectation VS Reality" jokes ready to go, but they were unnecessary. 😂

Lastly, have Light Mode Goofy Loop because they killed me when I flipped the lights on. They are SO crusty <3

[bluebeads-art]

Updated both this blog's [url].tumblr.com and tumblr.com/[url] themes because I got tired of flashbanging myself at night with the light theme. And I'm realizing. I think. This blog had had the same theme since I made it. Almost eight years ago. Oh god. No wonder it was like that, I still had young person eyes back then...

[bluebeads-art]

As the flash hits your eye, you feel something crashing into you from all directions. Below you is obvious, Bonbon situated themself to bump into you while the picture was taken. You look to your right, and Mirabelle’s cheek is pressed up to yours. On your left, Isabeau’s sheepishly hugged you to his side. There’s a hand in your hair, too, and it feels like Madame Odile. [...] “We need a souvenir of this trip,” Mirabelle adds. She rushes to the ground to pick up the picture and snort-laughs as she looks at it. “Oh no, Siffrin looks like we’re holding him hostage!” — Curtain Call, Chapter 9, by @openphrase123 (Link in the replies)

2024 October 22nd

Fanfic fanart fanfic fanart!! When I read the "hostage" line, it invoked such a clear image in my head of Siffrin tensed up like a startled prey animal that it got added to my list of things to maybe draw immediately.

Dooon't think about the words 'left' and 'right' in that quote too hard. I know how to read I prommy. :) (I did Not process those words and lost the coin flip in the composition phase...)

Close-up and ramblings about the cans of worms I unleashed upon myself under the cut

Time taken on this was [head in hands] 48 hours and 37 minutes.... That bloated number has two culprits:

1) I got a new tablet! My old one was 10 years old. Its plastic was melting and the electronics had ghosts in 'em, so it needed the sweet release of retirement. However, I had just gotten to the line art phase when the switch happened. Clumsily getting used to the new one during the most precise phase of the process did devastating things to my perfectionism.

2) I made a GRAVE mistake with how I chose to color this. I wanted to keep the grayscale layers for accuracy instead of just slapping a B&W filter over the colored version, so all the colors come from gradient maps, color balance layers, overlay layers, and raster layers clipped to other layers. Listen. I'm used to working with lots of layers. I like keeping things separate so I can edit them more easily. But this is the worst layer system I have ever created. Going from color to B&W requires toggling exactly 20 layers & folders on or off. There are 87 visible layers total. This file lags when you edit it. I've never wanted CSP v1.13 to have layer comps more in my life.

Not helping matters was Isabeau. I said he was the easiest to draw in my last post, but he took that as a challenge, apparently. It's a simple fist-on-hip pose, why was that so hard!?! His face gave me grief too.

Odile's lil' wave got added at the end of the line art phase. I've never added to a sketch that late in the game before, but I felt bad about how little screen area she got, haha. Girl, I tried, but this composition was not kind to you.

Giving Isa, Odile, and Siffrin skin colors felt cursed. Well... "color" is maybe a stretch for Sif. The pallor from being affection-jumpscared isn't helping. In the dev's nose reveal post, they said that Siffrin isn't white but is white-passing, so BOOM albinism headcanon. Like c'mon, they wear a big hat and have most of their skin covered because the sun is a deadly laser when you have little to no melanin and idk if sunblock exists in-universe. Heck, maybe most Islanders have it, their whole religion is about the night sky so maybe they're nocturnal. This makes perfect sense. :)